Hudson, Wis., August 25, 1885. Hon. William F. Vilas,
Postmaster-General, Washington, D. C.
Dear Sir.--For some time I have been thinking of writing to you and
asking you how you were getting along with your department since I left
it. I did not wish to write to you for the purpose of currying favor
with an administration against which I squandered a ballot last fall.
Neither do I desire to convey the impression that I would like to open
a correspondence with you for the purpose of killing time. If you ever
feel like sitting down and answering this letter in an off-hand way
it would please me very much, but do not put yourself out to do so.
I wanted to ask you, however, how you like the pictures of yourself
recently published by the patent insides. That was my principal object
in writing. Having seen you before this great calamity befell you, I
wanted to inquire whether you had really changed so much. As I remember
your face, it was rather unusually intellectual and attractive for a
great man. Great men are very rarely pretty. I guess that, aside from
yourself, myself, and Mr. Evarts, there is hardly an eminent man in the
country who would be considered handsome. But the engraver has done you
a great injustice, or else you have sadly changed since I saw you. It
hardly seems possible that your nose has drifted around to leeward and
swelled up at the end, as the engraver would have us believe.
[Illustration: 0222]
I do not believe that in a few short months the look of firmness
and conscious rectitude that I noticed could have changed to that of
indecision and vacuity which we see in some of your late portraits as
printed.
I saw one yesterday, with your name attached to it, and it made my heart
ache for your family. As a resident in your State I felt humiliated.
Two of Wisconsin's ablest men have thus been slaughtered by the rude
broad-axe of the engraver. Last fall, Senator Spooner, who is also a man
with a first-class head and face, was libeled in this same reckless way.
It makes me mad, and in that way impairs my usefulness. I am not a good
citizen, husband or father when I am mad. I am a perfect simoon of wrath
at such times, and I am not responsible for what I do.
Nothing can arouse the indignation of your friends, regardless of
party, so much as the thought that while you are working so hard in the
postoffice at Washington with your coat off, collecting box rent and
making up the Western mail, the remorseless engraver and electrotyper
are seeking to down you by making pictures of you in which you appear
either as a dude or a tough.
While I have not the pleasure of being a member of your party, having
belonged to what has been sneeringly alluded to as the g. o. p., I
cannot refrain from expressing my sympathy at this time. Though we may
have differed heretofore upon important questions of political economy,
I cannot exult over these portraits. Others may gloat over these efforts
to injure you, but I do not. I am not much of a gloater, anyhow.