The new North-west. [volume] (Deer Lodge, Mont.) 1869-1897, 1875-04-23
Gath's" Picture of Theodore.

OeOfSe Alfred townsend IN Fnliaueiphia llnes
Some of the friends of Theodore think
the sketch I sent yon of the ideal-good-boy
was severe. They differ from me. The
first heard of Tilton personally, was at
Aurora, Illinois, where lectured one win
ter, without any moral objects whatever.
T'ilton, who always travelled with beautl-
full moral, followed me, and hearing me
little talked of there, expressed himself to
the effect that on the great ideas of the day
was Indifferent think the matter with
the great moral ideas of the day is that
there are too many Tilton's in them.
Young men had better leave off reforming
the world until they can wear boots in it.
If Tilton had ridden in the war as a cores
pondent, instead of sitting in Beecher's
sanctum abusing all generals who were not
abolitionists or savages, he would not have
been the vain giraffe that he is, grazing on
the ineffable. Again, went to his house
hast summer, and by hard work and man
agemcnt, aided by bis good will, no less,
carried off to Chicago great mass of
marital correspondence, for which | was
entitled to a considerable sum of money.
Tilton, however, always overriding every
thing, wrote to the newspaper, of his own
self-absorbing volition, that they were his
personal present. AS consequence lost
my profits, but found him out. He will
permit anybody in the world to serve him
and then quietly ignore them, with his soft,
giraffe like head and neck, eating off the
Empyrean again. No man can hold a
friend worth holding, who habitually uses
him, and Mr.. Tilton has made Frank
Moulton pay a heavy price for Franks
fealty. | noticed during last summer that
Mr.. Tilton made no pause nor beed to the
delicacy or Inconvenience of any person if
he could use the person against Beecher.
He took Henry nj. Smith before reporter
to embroil Smith and the Rev. Mr.. Patton,
of Chicago, in the Proctor Bowen story,
and drew his friend Demas Barnes into a
libel suit thereby. Still, all this might be
the effect Of an uncompromising nature
aroused by conjugal treachery and the per-
secntion of power That Beeeher did some
thing which made him fly, like Cain before
an inquiring God, is true, unless Heaven
worked miracle ON Brooklyn Heights and
made Tilton the Balaam to ride Beecher
so hard that he spoke like an ass But that
would have been no miracle.
Shall we approach the lovely woman WHO
hac YnaIa oil thic ,a,,oo yrifl,o,,f
the touch stone? Lightly, Hippocrates,
lightly touch the white-souled interior with
the marble statue fashion of lying abed.
These two forms of description of the
same woman by the husband and the cleri-
cal lover, show her power over both and
their homage. Mr.. Beecher likened her,
after she betrayed him to her husband, to
"a sculptuled saint " with the heart of "a
poor child" Tilton beholds her doing her
best to help his enemies and in their pay,
and he says that she is merely the conquest
Of her religious emotionalism. Two such
celebrated men could have been misled by
no uncommon woman, and her type of face
and mind, as we'll as her brothers indicates
Il mere abstruse race of people than the
glcy-eyed, brown-haired Beechers and Til
tons. Beecher's type is that of a warm
bloodtd boy, impatient of restraints and
compounding for sin with more and more
devotion Driven backward to piety by
the remorse OF sin, and onward to eloquence
and wit by its experience, he has suffered
a decay Of the moral powers which required
only Il human emergency like this to show
it. a frightened coward grasping at straws
to save himself; this is the God-lke Faust,
the Puritan-thrilling Dimmesdale. ~Tilton
is no cherub, but he is Il very thin conspir-
ator The blackmail charge he can disprove
on the ground of insufficient sense. He
who blackmails goes silently on his errand,
and reads no manuscript To Jim, William
and John Henry. That, with his envy and
image-breaking nature, Titon might want
to expose Beecher is possible, but how
without a cause? And with ones wife,
the fount of onc's children, the trophy Of
his youth, and his companion in the grave!
No! There is not enough Of /. Iilton to
employ his wife i'll that way against her
consent, and make the Plymouth-intrenche
Beecher take TO his bomb proofs, unless
there be a genuine discovery. That ad-
mitted, it is easy to see Beecher OF the run
and Mrs. Tilton, the slavish penitent, with
several friends on the ragged edge and the
uptown blackmailers hi-spying.