a letter which he addressed to you in November. This last-mentioned letter was referred by you to me, and I beg to remind you of the observations which I made upon t in a letter I addressed to you at that time.

Mr. Walsh was, at the last trial of the case of United States v. Brady and others, an important witness for the Government. He has come to regard himself, as his letter to the President shows, as an essential witness, and disposed to dictate to those in charge of the prosecution what they shall do and how they shall do it, and to set up his own views both of law and expediency as better than those of the gentlemen who are charged with the responsibility of the "star-route cases." He regards his own conduct and character as so pure that he can make charges against them, not only without evidence, but in the face of the very evidence to which he refers.

He has been subjected to much abuse from the defendants in the case on trial and their friends, and therefore some irritation on his part would be excusable, though it hardly justifies him in attacking those who have defended him. there is much in his letter which induces me to believe that he has fallen under the influence of those interested against the Government who are catering to his vanity and desire for revenge, or holding out to him the hope of pecuniary advantage. Bearing in mind these circumstances, I refrain from characterizing the letter as a whole in the terms which it would seem to deserve at my hands. While for reasons not necessary to be gone into here, the Government is not in a position where the testimony of Mr. Walsh would be as important as it undoubtedly was on the former trial, yet he is still a desirable witness, and I do not feel that I ought by any expression of my personal feelings either to tend to discredit him as a witness, or to intensify his present position of dissatisfaction with those whom he claims a desire to aid. But at the same time I reserve the right to make further reply when no possible harm can come to the prosecution by my so doing.

Mr. Walsh expresses his personal distrust of the sincerity of the prosecutors and his dissent from the judgment exercised by them in selecting the particular case to be first tried. Without pausing here to suggest that he is not in a position to judge as to either fact, and not by education or experience competent to judge, I may observe that after he testified on the last trial he voluntarily stated to me that though he had at one time doubted whether we had selected wisely, he was then thoroughly convinced that we were right.

Mr. Walsh complains that there was some conspiracy or contrivance by which a former grand jury failed to find an indictment upon his testimony. He makes a special and gratuitous fling at some unnamed meinber of the President's Cabinet, but does not dare to name him or to assert what he did. Indeed, he refers to the matter only as a report or rumor. The only act of any one indicated by bim is the introduction into the grand jury room of a book purporting to contain evidence given before a committee of the Senate.

As to the latter, I have already expressed my views in my letter in reply to Mr. Walsh's communication to you, to which I have referred. The book was, as I infer, sent for by the grand jury." They had, as I think, a right so to do, but whether this was so or not, there is no evidence that it was anything but an error of judgment, and certainly not a transaction which should lead to a general denunciation, not only of the grand jury, but of the prosecution, and of you, because you do not proceed to investigate and indict the grand jury or others.

A brief statement of the history of matters will serve to dispose of much of what Mr. Walsh says:

Mr. Walsh was a witness before one grand jury in May or June. Upon his testimouy and that of several witnesses summoned from Texas, James B. Price and Thomas J. Brady were indicted for conspiracy in connection with certain mail routes in Texas. In the course of that examination before the grand jury Mr. Walsh, in referring to certain post-office drafts, casually mentioned that they were brought to him by a Mr. Kellogg, and it was only accidentally that it was brought out whom he meant. Neither I nor any one representing the Government had up to that time ever heard the name of Mr. Kellogg in connection with the matter, and he was not then, as I understood it, mentioned as a person whose connection with it was in any sense criminal. Some days after the grand jury had adjourned I heard reports, obviously set afloat by Walsh, that the case had not been pushed before the grand jury as against Senator Kellogg. I at once stated to my associate counsel that the grand jury must be recalled. They concurred with me, though I am under the impression that they did not attach so much importance to it as I did, for the reason that it was my action or failure to act, which the rumors impugned. I applied to Judge Wylie to reconvene the grand jury. He hesitated; in fact, intimated that he should decline, wherenpon I stated the facts to him in detail and begged him as a matter of personal justice, if such a thing was proper to be considered, to reconvene the grand jury. He did reconvene it. Mr. Walsh was put before it as a witness. On the first day he testified only partially, as he afterwards stated to me, because he did not mean to tell anything more than he thought was necessary to secure an indictment.

What he stated on the first day was calculated to raise suspicions against Mr. Kelllogg, but not much more. For the purpose of procuring inore testimony and enabling or inducing him to produce some corroborative proof, I induced the grand jury to adjourn to another day. On that day Mr. Walsh gave much more testimony. He produced some papers. I questioned him carefully and in detail, nutil he stated that he had told all he knew. He made a much stronger case against Mr. Kellogg than the previous day, a case in which, if I had been a grand juror, I think I should bave voted to find an indictment against Mr. Kellogg. At the same time there was a gap left in the case as disclosed by his testimony, for though it showed Mr. Kellogg's connection with and possession of the postal drafts which was alleged to have been given in pursuance of the conspiracy; though Mr. Kellogg was shown to have interested himself to prevent investigation; and though there were other things indicating Mr. Kellogg's wrongful connection with the matter, still a conscientious grand juror could, I think, be of the opinion that the evidence was not sufficient as to Mr. Kellogg to show criminality.

Mr. Walsh did not on either day give his testimony in a manner to inspire entire confidence, and there were some improbabilities in some portions of it. It was a case where two men equally honest might differ. It was, moreover, a case where if an indictment had been found there could have been no conviction without further testimony. The grand jury in fact refused to find a bill. They did so, as I have been informed, by a vote substantially unanimous. Whether this conclusion was wrong or right, it is certain that the fact that the conclusion was arrived at, even in connection with the introduction into the grand jury room of the book I have referred to, does not alone constitute ground for charges of criminality against the grand jury. Nor is it necessary to assume, as Mr. Walsh does, that because the grand jury did not indict they did not believe him.

Mr. Walsh is, however, in no position to complain of the action of the Government, for he is at this moment evading the service of subpoena on him requiring him to appear and testify before a grand jury, to which the Government is prepared to present evidence to sustain Mr. Walsh, evidence procured by the Government after great trouble. Mr. Walsh knows that we desire his presence; he knows for what purpose we desire it, and he knows that the confirmatory evidence the Government has is the precise evidence he desired should be obtained, and yet he evades service, and sends word to us that we can serve him if we can find him, and that he will come to Washington only when he gets ready. For ten days we have had men watching for him in two cities. We know that he has received our letters. We know that he has seen his counsel to whom we have stated what we desired, and he refuses to appear. He prefers to write a long letter complaining of the Government for not doing the very thing it is seeking to do, and to do which it desires from him only the assistance which every good citizen owes to his Government. Judging by past experience he will soon give his entire correspondence to the public, and thereby aid them whom he claims to be seeking to punish. I trust that he may not so do in such a manner as to compel the Government to make public the real facts of the case, for that would go far to destroy the effect of the evidence we hope to obtain from him, for the human mind is so made up that a witness who so acts does not, even when he is telling the undoubted truth, receive the same credence as he would if he had come forward frankly and promptly.

I do not feel called upon here to refer in detail to Mr. Walsh's insinuations as to the charges against other persons claimed to have been implicated in the star-route frauds. The action of counsel in these cases has been fully reported to and approved to you. There is much more reason to believe that Mr. Walsh is at the present moment engaged with others formerly connected with the prosecution in a scheme to procure money from these alleged criminals than there is to distrust the sincerity or judgment of any one now concerned in the prosecution.

Mr. Walsh's statement as to what occurred on the former trial, as to my alleged neglect to urge the case against Mr. S. W. Dorsey, as to my being rebuked by other counsel, and as to the action of the court, is shown by the record to be thoroughly

false.

For the reasons already suggested, you will perceive that it is very desirable that nothing that Mr. Walsh shall say or do should lead to a publication of this letter until after the pending trial is finished, unless his future course shall be such as to lead counsel to consider it unsafe to call him as a witness.

Your obedient servant,

Hon. BENJAMIN HARRIS BREWSTER,

Attorney-General.

GEORGE BLISS, Special Assistant District Attorney.

In my previous testimony here I expressed the belief or the recollec tion that Mr. Walsh's testimony before the grand jury on the first day

was full, and that he did not add much to it on the second day. I see by this letter, which was written when the matter was, of course, fresh in my mind, that I was wrong about that, and I see by Mr. Walsh's testimony that he states that he did not testify fully the first day. I submit that it is evident from that letter that I was sufficiently careful about not undertaking to discredit Mr. Walsh; but he says that I ought to have selected route. No. 40101 for prosecution instead of the Dorsey

case

Mr. STEWART (interposing). I do not suppose that it is necessary to answer that expression of opinion.

The WITNESS. I am not going into that in detail. After the expres sion of opinion by Mr. Merrick on that subject, I do not think it is necessary for me to go into it in detail. What I do desire in that connection is to show something that every member of the committee will see is important. Walsh refers to the fact that Hinds was an important witness, and that Hinds could have testified in that case to important transactions with Brady, and he says that he (Walsh) would have come in simply to confirm the statements of Hinds. Now, in point of fact, as to the prosecution of Hinds, and his transactions with Brady, the statute of limitations had run against them. Then, in the second place, I have here the affidavit of Hinds, taken by Mr. Woodward, in which it appears that Hinds had no personal knowledge of the payment of money to Brady, or of any corrupt negotiations on Brady's part. There was a Mr. Brown that Hinds had negotiations with, and to whom he paid money, and part of Walsh's money went to Brown, but Hinds never was permitted to go any further than the outer door of Brady's room. Brown went in with a commission to accomplish certain things, but he did not accomplish them. He accomplished them in part, but not in full. However, the point I want to call attention to here is the statement of Hinds, to whom Walsh refers as an important witness in that case. This is an affidavit which we had before us at the time we made our decision, and I want to refer to this part of it as showing where that case would have brought us. Mr. Hinds charges distinctly in his affidavit that Walsh was a conspirator with Brady, and that the relations between Walsh and Brady were corrupt. Moreover, Mr. Hinds puts into his affidavit this passage:

After the departure of Brown, Walsh said to Hinds (who is making the affidavit), "When you have any more of the light work to do, let me know. I can do as much with Brady as any man." Hinds replied that he wanted no one's assistance in that kind of business. This occurred October 3, 1878.

Therefore, if we had gone on with that route, No. 40101, relying on Hinds, we should have had, in the first place, a witness who was accusing Walsh of conspiracy, and who was testifying that Walsh had himself used language which implied that his relations to Mr. Brady were not as innocent as he wishes you gentlemen to infer they were. Mr. Hinds made a second affidavit, which related to the route from Las Vegas to Albuquerque, which covered part of the same general ground. Therefore we did not go in on route 40101. Mr. Walsh leaves it in his testimony to be inferred, though perhaps he does not distinctly say, that his being made a witness in behalf of the Government was consequent on his bringing his civil suit against Brady. The little difficulty about that is that he did not bring his suit until a year after he was made a witness. The fact is that all through the summer of 1881, before I came into the case, I have Mr. Woodward's authority for saying that Walsh was dropping in little pieces of information, and giving advice. Mr. Woodward naturally came upon him in the case, because his name ap

peared on the Price drafts, indorsing them, and everybody whose name appeared on those or any of the papers was to be looked up, as far as possible.

By the CHAIRMAN:

Q. Referring to Hinds's statement, is it to be inferred, from what you have said in regard to it, that Hinds would have testified that the transaction by which expedition was obtained on route 40101 was corrupt ?— A. No, sir; he would have testified to this: He would have testified to payments to S. P. Brown, and to a statement by Brown of his dividing with Brady; and obviously the idea thrown out in the whole course of the affair indicated that the money that Brown was getting from MeDonough and Kirk and Walsh was corruptly used. And there were some singular transactions; as, for instance, Mr. Brown going with Hinds to Brady's office, Hinds sitting in an outer room, and Brown going in and coming out and saying that there would be an order for expedition that afternoon, and so on. The orders, however, did not come in the precise form in which they were bargained for. Originally they were $20,000 or $30,000 less, and Brown had to go back and try to do some thing more; but he could not at any time get the compensation up to the point that the original arrangement with Walsh and the others had contemplated. If you ask me my opinion, assuming that Hinds's statement of what occurred with Brown is correct, I should say that if you were dealing with a man of unimpeachable integrity as PostmasterGeneral, or Second Assistant Postmaster General, there was nothing in the evidence on which you could come to any other conclusion than that Brown had used his intimacy with Brady to get some money for himself, and that the orders were obtained in the proper way. But when we came to deal with the condition of things which was then and there existing in the Department, the impression on my mind was that the orders on route No. 40101 had been obtained corruptly.

Q. Those and the subsequent orders after Walsh became the contractor?-A. No, sir; I am talking now about the previous orders. As to the orders after Walsh became a contractor, Mr. Walsh originally said to us that his relations to the matter were simply those of a man who had loaned money, and that he was entirely innocent of any wrongdoing. I obtained by accident confirmatory evidence of the fact of the loan-I say by accident, but it was not by accident; it was my own doing. Walsh had stated that he had paid some money to Brady at the office of Hatch & Foote, in New York; that he had drawn the bills from Winslow, Lanier & Co., and had drawn a larger amount from which he had taken the money loaned. I subpoenaed Hatch & Foote, and required them to send their books here and to produce the account. They sent their books over with directions to the clerk who brought them not to let them be seen by anybody until they were produced on the stand. However, I got access to the books before he went on the stand, and I found on the precise day mentioned an entry in Brady's account of the $10,000 borrowed from Walsh, and a memorandum showing that it was paid in cash-not an absolute statement that it was paid in cash, but it was marked "C," and the evidence was that "C" was used to mark cases in which the money was paid in cash, as it was rather an unusual thing in a New York broker's office to have a sum of that kind paid in money. So that that evidence seemed to confirm Walsh's statement. But Walsh's testimony on the trial, particularly as to the matter which seems to have affected Governor Stewart's mind somewhat here, his story of the stealing of the notes by Brady, subjected him to con

siderable suspicion and criticism as to whether it was true, and if you are asking my opinion about it, my opinion is that Walsh had the money transactions with Brady that he said he had, but I believe they were not loans; I believe they were corrupt; I believe the money was paid for the purpose of securing expedition on route 40101, and probably on some other routes. Now, in that connection I desire to submit some testimony which I have in my possession. I referred to it when I was before the committee the other day, and have had it in my possession all the time, but I confess that I had not read it over with much care until the night before last. The evidence I refer to is the statement which Mr. Walsh mentions as having been made by him, and taken down by Mr. Gibson, and which I told you Mr. Gibson produced at Long Branch when we went there on the 14th of September, 1881. The paper is entirely in Mr. Gibson's handwriting, except as I shall hereafter state. The statement is a long one. It goes over Mr. Walsh's relations to route No. 40101, to Mr. Hinds, and to the other parties. Mr. Gibson, having prepared it, gave it to me, and I had Mr. Walsh come to my room at the Arlington and take up this paper and go through it with me. That is my present recollection. It may be, however, that Gibson gave it to Walsh, and that Walsh brought it to me. However, the important point here is that the paper is altered in the handwriting of Walsh himself all the way through. For instance, on page 33 this is added: "This impression is based on what Hinds has told W." That is in Walsh's handwriting.

Q. That is Walsh's statement from which you are reading?—A. It is Gibson's statement of what Walsh told him, taken down by Gibson and then given to Walsh and corrected by him.

Q. Revised?-A. Revised. But it went further than ordinary revision. After he had made these corrections he came to my room and sat down with me, and we spent several hours going over the statement. I was pretty green in post-office matters then (this was on the 28th of September, 1881), and I did not take in all the points readily. I did not understand, for instance, the matter of subcontracts. I had the whole terminology to learn. As we went along and read the paper we stopped, and I got explanations and made notes on the margin. Here, for instance, with reference to some paper, I have written on the margin "Walsh has it," and all the way through there are such memoranda made by me. Then at the end comes this: "Read to Walsh at the Arlington Hotel, and agreed to as corrected. September 28.-GEORGE BLISS." Therefore you see that Walsh went over that paper with unusual care. Now, bearing that fact in mind, I call your attention to some of the contents of the paper. The whole paper is, of course, at the committee's service, but I want to read to you Walsh's statement then and there made as to his transactions with Brady. As I read it you will see that there are no notes mentioned as having been given by Brady, and that there is no mention of the grabbing of notes by Bradynothing of that kind-and I think it can now be shown that those notes did not exist, even in Walsh's mind, until towards the 1st of May, 1882. I read now an extract from this statement of Walsh. He says:

Previous to this Brady had borrowed at different times large sums of money from Walsh, representing to him that he was in heavy stock transactions and needed money to help him along; that he would pay him back at the proper time. Brady seemed to look upon Walsh as a veritable bonanza, from which he could take out money at any time. Walsh advanced the money to Buell.

He then goes on and gives the dates of the loans of money by him to Brady. Those dates do not correspond with his evidence given on the