By this comparison the Sulzer impeachment was a travesty, the defendant a petty misdemeanant, and the purpose of the trial a spiteful vengeance on a rebellious henchman. The setting of the Court, however, gave the event a fictitious dignity. The Senate Chamber at Albany had been altered for the occasion by the state architect. A lofty seat had been provided for the presiding judge of the High Court of Impeachment, Judge Edgar M. Cullen, who, as chief judge of the Court of Appeals, presided _ex officio_. Below him was a long seat for the associate judges. Ascending tiers of seats were provided for the forty-four members of the State Senate who, with the judges of the Court of Appeals, constituted the High Court of Impeachment. Behind Judge Cullen’s chair the entire wall of the room was hung with a dark red velvet curtain in the centre of which was emblazoned the coat of arms of New York in gold embroidery, flanked on either side by national emblems. At one side of the court room, places were provided for the “Fourth Estate,” the gentlemen of the press, to whom Burke had made so eloquent an appeal on the greater historical occasion. The public balcony, which at the Hastings trial had been crowded with the Sarah Siddonses and the _haut ton_ of London, was, here at Albany, crowded with the vengeful Knickerbocker aristocracy, who had come to gloat in triumph over the final discomfiture of the demagogic desecrator of the executive mansion. The Edmund Burke of the Sulzer impeachment was Edgar T. Brackett, late of the New York Senate. Alton B. Parker and John B. Stanchfield were the chief counsel of the managers for the Assembly which had presented the indictment, but Brackett was the man who made the oratorical impeachment. Sulzer stood upon the prerogative of early precedents and refused to make a personal appearance before the Court. In compliance with a judicial ruling he abstained from functioning as Governor while the trial was in progress and, instead of facing his accusers, spent his time in a frantic but futile effort to make political combinations that would save him.
Witness after witness testified to Sulzer’s solicitation of contributions for which he had made no accounting. My testimony was only confirmatory of a mass of evidence elicited from men of eminence like Jacob H. Schiff and many others. I appeared before the Court on September 24, 1913. Replying to questions from the prosecutor, I repeated the conversation I had had with Sulzer when I gave him my check for $1,000, and I also testified to the fact that on the day I returned from Europe, Governor Sulzer had telephoned me, “If you are going to testify I hope you will be easy with me”--to which I answered that I would testify to the facts.