the course you have thus far adopted. They would go back now if the
Republican party insisted on it.

Mr. President, I hate to write to you in this tone of voice, because I
know the pain it will give you. I once held an office myself, Mr.
President, and it hurt my feelings very much to have a warm personal
friend criticise my official acts.

The worst feature of the whole thing, Mr. President, is that it will
encourage crime. If men who never committed any crime are allowed to earn
their living by the precarious methods peculiar to manual labor, and if
those who have abstained from office for years, by request of many
citizens, are to be denied the endorsement of the administration, they
will lose courage to go on and do right in the future. My friend desires
to state vicariously, in the strongest terms, that both he and his wife
feel the same way about it, and they will not promise to keep it quiet any
longer. They feel like crippling the administration in every way they can
if the present policy is to be pursued.

He says he dislikes to begin thus early to threaten a President who has
barely taken off his overshoes and drawn his mileage, but he thinks it may
prevent a recurrence of these unfortunate mistakes. He claims that you
have totally misunderstood the principles of the mugwumps all the way
through. You seem to regard the reform movement as one introduced for the
purpose of universal benefit. This was not the case. While fully endorsing
and supporting reform, he says that they did not go into it merely to kill
time or simply for fun. He also says that when he became a reformer and
supported you, he did not think there were so many prominent Democrats who
would have claims upon you. He can only now deplore the great national
poverty of offices and the boundless wealth of raw material in the