Harper's Weekly

“ Schurz accepts as a pledge for the practical reform of the civil service; and as the abandonment of such a pledge would be inextinguishable disgrace, he does not believe that it would be betrayed. Now undoubtedly Mr. Greeley expresses his honest views in this letter, but he makes no pledge. He says that he favors a reform of the civil service by the appointment of good men, and that a one-term President would have no temptation to appoint unfit men. ”

“ But is not every question of public policy the care of the people in the districts? They elect representatives of their views to the national legislature to frame laws accordingly, but they also elect a President who is made by the Constitution — through the veto power — a part of that legislature. ”

“ Were the President his most intimate friend, he could not defend what seemed to him an unconstitutional policy. This is a position which every honest man will approve. It is the only independent and honorable attitude. ”

“ If the Republican party has not accomplished all that might have been hoped, it is, he thinks, because the lawless element in the Southern States and the blind Democratic reactionists have made the conduct of Republican demagogues and schemers comparatively less alarming.
In regard to the annexation of San Domingo he said that it would be a policy ending in the absorption of the American tropics to the Gulf, with a population wholly alien. Mr. Schurz added that he and Mr. Sumner had been asked to compose their personal differences with the President in the interest of the party. ”

“ Sumner, he has a certain conscience in his intellect which gives moral force to his intellectual conclusions. In the Senate he has discussed national questions upon truly political and not merely party principles. A Republican, so to say, by nature, because by nature a lover of justice and progress, he has not hesitated to defend Republican principles against what have sometimes seemed to him Republican errors of method. ”