CARL SCHURZ'S POLITICAL CAREER
success against any Republican candidate but Blaine, and but the slightest chance against even him. The Independents have been alienated and the spoils Democrats, who at heart despise the President, are jubilant. The spoilsmen “understand perfectly who those are whom you dismiss as ‘impracticable friends’ and men of ‘misguided zeal.’ They remember well that this is the same taunt those men had to hear from the Republican side when they threw their political fortunes to the winds, repudiated Blaine, turned their backs upon their party and supported you who promised to be the champion of their common principles. And the spoilsmen eagerly believe that the spirit which inspires that taunt now cannot be very different from that which inspired it on the other side two years ago.” The President's attempt to please both reformers and spoilsmen, Mr. Schurz assured him, had failed. “I warned you more than once that your principal danger was to sit down between two chairs. I am afraid you are virtually there now.”
It is hardly surprising that from this time the President manifested much irritability in his communications to Mr. Schurz and other aggressive reformers. A striking illustration of this occurred in the following August. The National Civil Service Reform League, which had been organized in 1881, was very active in agitation for its cause, under the presidency of George William Curtis. Its annual meeting of 1887 was announced for August in Newport. A gentleman whom Mr. Cleveland had appointed to an important place in the New York custom house, was an active member of the executive committee of the League. To the utter and almost comical consternation of this official, he received from the President a warning not to attend the Newport meeting, on the ground that it would involve the same interference in politics that
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