subscribers. I was on excellent terms with Mr. Jones and admired
him. The New York Times became under his management one of
the severest critics of General Grant's administration and of
the president himself.

I went to his house and during the conversation Jones said to me:
"I was very much surprised to receive a letter from the president
asking me to come and see him at the White House. Of course I
went, anticipating a disagreeable interview, but it turned out
absolutely the reverse. The president was most cordial, and his
frankness most attractive. After a long and full discussion,
the president said the Times had been his most unsparing critic,
but he was forced to agree with much the Times said; that he had
sent for me to make a request; that he had come to the presidency
without any preparation whatever for its duties or for civic
responsibilities; that he was compelled to take the best advice he
could find and surround himself with men, many of whom he had
never met before, and they were his guides and teachers; that he,
however, assumed the entire responsibility for everything he had
done. He knew perfectly well, in the retrospect and with the
larger experience he had gained, that he had made many mistakes.
'And now, Mr. Jones,' he continued, 'I have sent for you as
the most powerful as well as, I think, the fairest of my critics,
to ask that you will say in your final summing up of my eight years
that, however many my errors or mistakes, they were faults of
judgment, and that I acted conscientiously and in any way I thought
was right and best.'

"I told the president I would be delighted to take that view in
the Times. Then the president said that he would like to show