vulgar anonymous communications which rarely receive any attention unless they are important enough to have the police set on the track of the writer to find his rathole, if possible.  A paragraph in the “Daily Advertiser” of June 7, 1869, quotes from a Western paper a story to the effect that one William R. M’Crackin, who had recently died at-----confessed to having written the M’ Crackin letter.  Motley, he said, had snubbed him and refused to lend him money.  “He appears to have been a Bohemian of the lowest order.”  Between such authorship and the anonymous there does not seem to be much to choose.  But the dying confession sounds in my ears as decidedly apocryphal.  As for the letter, I had rather characterize it than reproduce it.  It is an offence to decency and a disgrace to the national record on which it is found.  This letter of “George W. M’Crackin” passed into the hands of Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State.  Most gentlemen, I think, would have destroyed it on the spot, as it was not fit for the waste-basket.  Some, more cautious, might have smothered it among the piles of their private communications.  If any notice was taken of it, one would say that a private note to each of the gentlemen attacked might have warned him that there were malicious eavesdroppers about, ready to catch up any careless expression he might let fall and make a scandalous report of it to his detriment.

The secretary, acquiescing without resistance in a suggestion of the President, saw fit to address a formal note to several of the gentlemen mentioned in the M’Crackin letter, repeating some of its offensive expressions, and requesting those officials to deny or confirm the report that they had uttered them.

A gentleman who is asked whether he has spoken in a “malignant” or “offensive” manner, whether he has “railed violently and shamefully” against the President of the United States, or against anybody else, might well wonder who would address such a question to the humblest citizen not supposed to be wanting in a common measure of self-respect.  A gentleman holding an important official station in a foreign country, receiving a letter containing such questions, signed by the prime minister of his government, if he did not think himself imposed upon by a forgery, might well consider himself outraged.  It was a letter of this kind which was sent by the Secretary of State to the Minister Plenipotentiary to the Empire of Austria.  Not quite all the vulgar insolence of the M’Crackin letter was repeated.  Mr. Seward did not ask Mr. Motley to deny or confirm the assertion of the letter that he was a “thorough flunky” and “un-American functionary.”  But he did insult him with various questions suggested by the anonymous letter,—­questions that must have been felt as an indignity by the most thick-skinned of battered politicians.