Excerpt from An Open Letter to Hon. Wilbur F. Sanders From Thomas H. Carter

While deploring your want of veracity, I am glad your suffering vanity and consuming malignity finally drove you into the Open, through your interview in the Helena Herald of the 12th instant. It is well known that your hand has been against every man to whom the people have given any prominence in Montana from the day you landed in the Territory. Always, when denied position at the front, you have devoted your energies to breeding strife and Spreading scandal. Your cruel disposition to assassinate private char acter has always been cheerfully indulged in creating and giving wings to evil report concerning the victims of your envy and malice. I do not recall a man of prominence connected with our history who has in any way crossed your path upon whom your slanderous tongue has not hurled the vicious burdens of your Sinister mind. General Meagher, Governor Potts, Chief Justice Wade, A. C. Botkin, Martin Maginnis, Governor Toole and a host of others, liv ing and dead, each in turn excited your animosity, just inproportion to the measure of public confidence and respect accorded them. As it has been my good fortune to be honored by the Republican party of our State and of the Nation to an unusual degree, so to an unusual degree have I become the object of your bitter animosity. For twelve years your mind has been devoted to the invention of every evil report you could spread with any sort of plausibility. Before the people of Montana I was successful; you were not. That was enough. My destruction at once became your cherished thought. Heretofore you have played the contemptible role of a private scandal-monger. Now, dur ing my absence from the State attending to public business, you make an open assault, for the obvious purpose of in fluencing the action of the Republican members of the legislature and the action of the President in regard to party matters in Montana.

Your alliance with the Helena Herald befits you. That paper was purchased under false pretenses and was run in the interest of William A. Clark during the last campaign, and is now engaged in an effort to prevent any party organiza tion in the approaching legislature, to the end that Opposi tion to Mr. Clark may be diminished. Your hypocritical phrases cannot conceal the fact that you are helping to procure that result. If yourself and the Herald can divide the Republicans, of course Mr. Clark will be the gainer. With this outcome as the inevitable consequence of any success your venture may reach, your diatribe starts out with the statement that the Republican party is ship wrecked, scattered, and peeled. That your premises are false can be readily demonstrated by the simple mathe maties of the situation. In 1896, the vote of Montana for President mckinley was only whereas in 1900 he received an increase of votes. In 1896 we only succeeded in electing seven members of the legislature.

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