158 HISTORY OF THE GRANGE MOVEMENT; OR, 



his usual wise policy of silence, wrote to the New York 

 Times a short communication, in which he referred to 

 the alleged terms of settlement of the previous July, so 

 for as they concerned himself, and denied them in the 

 following explicit language : ' I have had no dealings 

 with the Erie Railway Company, nor have I ever sold 

 that company any stock or received from them any 

 bonus. As to the suits instituted by Mr. Schell and 

 others, I had nothing to do with them, nor was I in 

 any way concerned in their settlement.' This was 

 certainly an announcement calculated to confuse the 

 public; but the confusion became confounded, when, 

 upon the 10th, Mr. Fisk followed him in a card, in 

 which he reiterated the alleged terms of settlement, and 

 reproduced two checks of the Erie Company, of July 

 11, 1868, made payable to the Treasurer and by him 

 endorsed to C. Vanderbilt, upon whose order they had 

 been paid. These two checks were for the sum of a 

 million of dollars. He further said that the company 

 had a paper in Mr. Vanderbilt's own handwriting, 

 stating that he had placed fifty thousand shares of Erie 

 stock in the hands of certain persons, to be delivered on 

 payment of $3,500,000, which sum he declared had 

 been paid. Undoubtedly these apparent discrepancies 

 of statement admitted of an explanation ; and some thin 

 veil of equivocation, such as the transaction of the busi- 

 ness through third parties, justified Vanderbilt's state- 

 ments to his own conscience. Comment, however, is 

 wholly superfluous, except to call attention to the 

 amount of weight which is to be given to the statements 

 and denials, apparently the most general and explicit, 

 which from time to time were made by the parties to 

 these proceedings. This short controversy merely 



