People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1894 — General Grant's Absolute Truth. [ARTICLE]

General Grant's Absolute Truth.

He was without exception the most absolutely truthful man I every encountered in public or private'life. This trait may be reconized in the frankness and honesty of expression in all his correspondence. He was not only truthful himself, but he had a horror of untruth in others. One day while sitting in his bedroom in the White House, -where he had retired to write a message to Congress, a card was brought in by a servant. An officer on duty at the time, seeing that the President did not want to be ’disturbed, remarked to the servant, “Say the President is not in.” General Grant overheard the remark, turned around suddenly in his chair, and cried out to the servant,” “Tell him no such thing. I don’t lie myself, and I don’t want any one to lie for me.”

When the President had before him for his action the famous Inflation Bill, a member of Congress urged him persistently to sign it. When he had vetoed it, and it was found that press and public everywhere justified his action, the congressman came out in a speech reciting how materially assisted in bringing about the veto. When the President read the report of the speech in the newspapers, he said, “How can So-and-so publicly such an untruth! Ido not see how he can ever look me in the face again.” He had a contempt for the man ever after. Even in ordinary conversation he would relate a simple incident which happened in one of his walks upon the street with all the accuracy of a translator of the new version of the Scrip tures; and if in telling the story he had said mistakenly, for instance, that he had met a man on the south side of the avenue, he would return to the subject hours afterward to correct the error and state with great particularity that it was on the north side of the avenue that the encounter had taken place. These corrections and constant efforts to be accurate in every statement he made once led a gentleman to say of him that he was “tediously” truthful.—From “Personal Traits of General Grant,” by General Horace Porter in McClure’s Magazine for May.