Tilden to the overthrow of what was known as the Tweed Ring, which had thoroughly debauched every branch of the New York City government, legislative, executive and judicial, and was threatening the State government also with its foul embrace.

"The total surrender of my professional business during that period," he has siiid in one of his published conimunications, " the nearly absolute withdrawal of attention from my private afl'airs, and from all enterprises in which I am interested, have cost nie a loss of actual income, which* with e.xpenditures and contributions the contest has required, would be a respectable endowment of a public charity.

" I do not speak of these things," he adds, "to regret them. In my opinion, no instrumentality in human society is so potential in its influence on the well-being of mankind as the governmental machinery which administers justice and makes and executes laws. No benefaction of private benevolence could he so fruitiul in benefits as the rescue of" this machinery from the perversion which had made it a means of conspiracy, fraud and crime against the rights ami the most sacred interests of a great community."

When Mr. Tilden thus wrote he had not experienced nor could he have foreseen the legal consummation of his labors in the arrest, imprisonment or flight of all the parties who, only a few months before, seemed to hold the wealth and power of the Empire State in the hollow of their hands, nor the condemnation of Tweed to the striped jacket and cell of a felon, nor the recovery of verdicts which promised to restore to the city treasury many millions of ill-gotten plunder.