LETTER. EAST WALPOLE, April 23. H. HAUPT, Esq.: In your printed letter under date of 14th instant, addressed to me, you say, referring to the learned judge who expressed an opinion favorable to my honesty, "as this gentleman expressed the hope that I would do nothing to make the breach irreconcilable, and volunteered a decided opinion that a more intimate acquaintance would make us friends, I will try to believe that you have been deceived by an unscrupulous enemy, and at a considerable sacrifice of self-respect will yield to the solicitation of others so far as to notice some of your statements." Do not flatter yourself that " a more intimate acquaintance will make us friends." That might be if my present opinion of you were formed upon the representations of others. I once had a certain estimate of your character, based upon representations of your friends. I have now a well settled opinion founded upon slight personal acquaintance and upon an intimate knowledge of facts. But I shall not be dragged into a personal controversy. I have nothing to do with you except as the representative of a public corporation and as an applicant for public charity. You deceive nobody who understands the facts in the case by your declaration repeated in various forms, that "not a dollar of this sum" (the $150,000 recommended by the committee) "would be received by the contractors." Every dollar of it was to be paid, and was intended to have been paid and would have been paid to cancel debts which you owed for work and materials for every dollar's worth of which the State has already paid This you in full. audacity to deny it. you know, and even you have not the You say : We express the opinion that liabilities should be paid to other parties, who, relying on the faith of the State and the permanency of the existing condition of things, furnished materials and performed service, but not a dollar of this sum would be received by the contractors. Parties having claims would be required to prove them, and the money would be paid directly into their hands. Every one of these parties "furnished materials and performed service" to you, not to the State. They furnished them to you, not "relying on the faith of the State" for payment, but relying on your good faith that, when you got your money of the State, you would pay them. You got your money of the State-every dollar of it-and did not pay them; that is all. "Not a dollar would be received by the contractors!" Oh, no! You ask the State to pay your private debts, but that is not paying any thing to you! Your whole capital now consists in your whining appeals for sympathy for sympathy for losses in this great work. In your letter to Mr. Carpenter, you say: "I did not engage in the work to make money; I have never had an interest in the profits." "If I have lost my property in the attempt to construct the Hoosac Tunnel, it has not been from visionary speculation, but from too great faith in Massachusetts." You have lost no property in this enterprise; 1st, Because you were not worth a dollar when you commenced it. I shall not dwell upon this, but it is true, and you know it, and if you don't, your creditors knew it when you came to Massachusetts. When I wrote the pamphlet to which your letter attempts to reply, I supposed, relying upon your own statements, with a quasi endorsement by your friends, that you brought to the State a respectable amount of capital. I have since learned that in this respect, as in all others, you had imposed upon us -that in truth you were bankrupt when you came here, and that all your talk about putting your private fortune into this work is without the slightest foundation. 2d. Because, as I shall show, you have received some hundreds of thousands of dollars more than you have put into the work. Upon this point I call your attention to the statement on page 24 of my pamphlet, prepared by Mr. Harris, presented to the committee, and not a figure disputed. Don't go into a passion about the Western Railroad, but look at the figures. It is a matter of arithmetic, not of rhetoric. This statement shows that, estimating every item of the cost of all you have done on this work from the beginning, the full cash value is $768,250, and that you have received, from the State, $925,389 for the same. The actual cash value of all the items of work done and materials furnished by you, is $768,250. You have therefore received $157,139 over and above the fair cost of the work. In addition to this sum of. You have received from towns, . Making a total of, . $157,139 00 125,500 00 $282,639 00 Now I charge that you have received, since you entered upon this work, at least that amount-$282,639-more than the whole work cost you. Don't fly off in a tangent, but disprove one of these figures. And there is but one way of disproving them; and that is, a statement of the amount and cost of work and materials, supported by something besides your own assertions. Again, let us look at it in another light. In House Doc., No. 235, page 111, we have the statement made by Mr. Harley, your assistant-engineer, to Mr. Whitwell, the State engineer, of the amount of work done on the road up to July 1, 1861. Here they are carried out at your own prices : (When finished, whole cost of bridges being $42,426.72.) 2,866 50 913 50 |