Centre Hall Reporter

[From the Republican August, 23rd.]

That Letter.

We are asked twenty times a day to explain what the hubbub in the Democratic camp is all about. In order that we may not thus be annoyed any more we will explain. We understand it originated in this way.

The Hon. Peter Gray Meek, in his canvass for renomination finds himself coming out of the little end of the horn, becomes desperate and starts for Pennsvalley, to retrieve his waning fortunes in that quarter. He circulates around among the faithful and exhibits a letter, purporting to have been written by Capt. Isaac Lytle, who happens to be the Secretary of the Republican County Committee, to Mr. James Chambers, a Republican of Patton township, of the highest standing, both as to political and personal character.

This letter while apparently written by a professed friend J. H. Orvis, Esq., was so worded as to really damage that gentleman, and benefit the unscrupulous Peter, who was taking so much pains to circulate it. In fact it slaughtered Orvis in the house of his friends.

Well, after this letter has done its work, it turns out to be a letter, never received by the person to whom it professed to have been addressed, and never written by the person whose name was attached to it. In short, it was a bare faced unmitigated fraud.

Mr. Chambers was in town a day or two after the Democratic convention met, and asserted most positively, he never received that or any other letter from Cap. Lytle, and Capt. Lytle is equally emphatic in denying that he ever wrote that, or any other letter to Mr. Chambers.

Captain Lytle, also, states that immediately upon hearing of the matter he called upon the Hon. Peter, whereupon the aforesaid Hon. Peter admitted and confessed to him, that he the said Hon. Peter wrote the letter himself while in Milheim, and knowing him (Cap. Lytle) to be warm personal friend, attached his name to it, and that at the same time he begged him (Lytle) for God's sake not to expose him; but to help him (Peter) to fix it up in some way.

This is the story as briefly as we could state it.

It is not our fight and we care but little what course our Democratic friends may pursue in the premises. There are some members of that party, honorable men in every business transaction, who, we are informed, are determined to sift this trick, this fraud, and may we not say, forgery to the very bottom. In their estimation it establishes a dangerous precedent and opens the door to all kinds of fraud, trickery and corruption. They say, to vote for a candidate who will resort to such tricks, is to endorse his course and thus make themselves equally guilty.

But Meek in the meantime remains unmoved, and declares that there is no heart in politics—that all is fair in politics, &c. He, no doubt, "endorses the Poet, when he says:

A politician Proteus-like must alter
His shape and habit; and like water seen
Of the same colour that the vessel is,
That which contain it; vary his form
With the chameleon each object's change.