Note 33 — TILDEN TO SMITH M. WEED

While knowing nothing of this correspondence, Mr. Tilden asked me one day while it proves to have been going on, "how the office of Secretary of Treasury would suit me, or rather how I would like it." I replied very promptly that I would not like it at all, nor would I accept it under any imaginable conditions; that I was principled against accepting any station, private or public, that I did not believe I could fill creditably, and that I did not feel competent to fill that office creditably; nor would I take it if I did, for its duties would be, from the beginning to the end, absolutely uncongenial to me.