The Writings of Carl Schurz/To Henry Cabot Lodge, July 12th, 1884
TO HENRY CABOT LODGE
My dear Mr. Lodge: I have long resisted my impulse to write to you, but I can resist no longer, although what I am going to say may look like an intrusion. My excuse must be that you are one of the young men for whom I have a very warm feeling.
I learned some time ago that you had declared for Blaine, and now I find in the papers an announcement of a ratification meeting at which you are expected to speak. I have no doubt you think, or at least you have persuaded yourself to think, that you are doing that which is best not only for yourself but for the country. Pardon me for entreating you to reëxamine carefully the reasons which have brought you to that conclusion, before you irretrievably commit yourself. You can scarcely fail to find that the question you have to deal with in determining your position is not a mere secondary point of policy upon which one might disagree with his party while at the same time voting the party ticket. It is this time one of those moral questions which touch the most vital spot in the working of our institutions. The election of Mr. Blaine to the Presidency will be a virtual indorsement of corrupt practices by the American people. It will establish a precedent teaching the growing generation and those coming after it, that a man may freely use his official power for private gain and still be considered by the American people worthy of the highest honors of the Republic. The crop of demoralization which will spring from such a seed, is incalculable. It may poison the whole future of the Republic.
To contribute to such a result or merely to the possibility of it is a thing which a man of your way of thinking can hardly feel easy about. I cannot think that you do and that you ever will. And such, I am sure, is the belief of those of your friends for whose confidence and esteem you have hitherto cared most. If you really do not feel quite certain that you are right you should consider the risk you are running,—a risk which you have perhaps not quite measured.
You will find all at once your position essentially changed. Those who have been your friends, the circle to which you naturally belong, will perhaps not loudly censure you. But you will soon begin to feel that your relations are no longer what they used to be. You will presently miss that open confidence to which you had been accustomed. This will be the case especially if under these circumstances you accept a regular nomination for Congress. I beg of you to think this all out for yourself. You are a young man. You have the great advantage of affluent circumstances. You have the promise of an honorable and useful career before you. That promise will certainly not be damaged if you follow a noble impulse at the risk of temporarily compromising your party standing and of obscuring the prospect of immediate preferment. A young public man rather strengthens him self in the esteem of those whose esteem is most valuable, even when they do not wholly agree with him, by an act of obedience to his best impulses, which at the same time is manifestly an act of unselfishness. A standing thus achieved is the moral basis of a career such as you would choose for yourself and as your most desirable friends will be proud to aid you in accomplishing.
But that promise may be fatally damaged in another way. The course you are in danger of following, as it takes you out of the fellowship of those with whom so far you have been bound together in sympathy and confidence, will unite you more and more in fellowship with the opposite element, the ordinary party politicians. The more you try to satisfy them, the less will you satisfy yourself. The result will be a disappointment all the more bitter as you then will see reason to reproach yourself for not having done the right thing, which was also the natural thing, at the decisive moment.
Believe an old and experienced friend, my dear Mr. Lodge, who tells you that you cannot afford to take the regular Republican nomination for Congress this autumn. You cannot afford to do it as a matter of ordinary prudence, were you ever so firmly convinced of being right with regard to the Presidential ticket. A young man may commit an impulsive indiscretion with impunity. But if he brings upon himself the suspicion, however unjust it may be, of stifling on an important occasion his best impulses for the purpose of getting quickly into place, the taint will stick to him as long as the companions of his young days live. He may never get rid of it. To avert it is worth a sacrifice.
I know I have sometimes spoken to you approvingly of your efforts to identify yourself with the “regular organization” and thus to make your way up. I should not object to unimportant concessions of points of policy to that end. But there is a moral limit to those concessions, and in this case I am strongly convinced that this limit is reached.
Will you pardon my frankness in saying all this to you? I should not have ventured to do it, in fact I should not have taken the trouble of doing it, were not my feelings for you warm and sincere. This being so, I should have reproached myself with an unperformed duty had I not made this attempt to warn you of what I conceive to be a great danger to your future career. It is certainly not too late to turn back. If you do it, do it promptly, straightforwardly and boldly.
I do not want to think of our speaking on different sides when I go to Massachusetts in this campaign.
Believe me, sincerely your friend,