Providence Morning Star

The Brooklyn Eagle has the following from Mr. Tilton on the Woodhull scandal:

My Complaining Friend: Thanks for your good letter of bad advice. You say, how easy to give the lie to the wicked story, and thus end it forever. But stop and consider, The story is a whole library of statements—a hundred or more—and it would be strange if some of them are not correct, though I doubt if any are. To give a general denial to such an encyclopedia of assertions would be as vague and irrelevant as to take up the Police Gazette, with its twenty-four pages of items, and say, "This is all a lie." So extensive a libel requires (if answered at all) a special denial of its several parts; and furthermore, it requires, in this particular case, not only a denial of things misstated, but a truthful explanation of other things that remain unstated and in mystery. In other words, the false story (if met at all) should be confronted and confounded by the true one. Now, my friend, you urge me to speak, but when the truth is a sword, God's mercy sometimes commands it sheathed. If you think I do not burn to defend my wife and little ones, you know not the fiery spirit within me. But my wife is a fountain of charity, and quenches all resentments. She says "Let there be no suffering, save to ourselves alone," and forbids a vindication to the injury of others. From the beginning she has stood with her hands upon my lips, saying "Hush." So when you prompt me to speak for her you counteract her more Christian mandate of silence. Moreover, after all, the chief victim of the public displeasure is myself alone, and so long as this is happily the case I shall try with patience to keep my answer within my own breast, lest it shoot forth like a thunderbolt through other hearts. Yours truly,
THEODORE TILTON.