Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/53

means to do right; let us assume his Cabinet officers mean the same. But now a host of Senators, Representatives, prominent political leaders from all parts of the country swarm in upon him. Having never had any practical contact with the workings of financial or commercial systems, having stood aloof from the intricacies of political management, the man at the head of the Government is the objective point of all their efforts. There are a hundred politicians of name and importance, real or pretended, who lay claim to his attention, and having heard them all—as he has to hear them—and finding that their views and objects run counter to one another, he suddenly discovers himself in an unexpected state of uncertainty as to what is right and what is not, what will serve the interest of the country and what will benefit or injure the interests of his party. He has to meet a multitude of arguments put at him by a multitude of men from a hundred different motives, all seeming to him important, because all are to him new; not a few among the most prominent of those who urge their opinions most strongly upon his mind, trained and skilled by long practical schooling in all the arts of covering up the weak points of their cases and concealing their motives by specious arguments, and of making private interests appear those of the public. They have all contributed to his election and success; they are all entitled to his regard; he has heard of them all as prominent men entitled to respect; he has considered them all as men entitled to credit; and now he discovers that their opinions clash and that their aims are different and contradictory. Scores of them beseeching him with their urgency to make him believe that the Cabinet minister he trusts, by the things he attempts to carry out is injuring the party upon whose permanence the life, or at least the welfare, of the Republic depends. He has yet to learn that the Senator in