The Writings of Carl Schurz/To Joseph Medill, September 21st, 1882
TO JOSEPH MEDILL
To-day I received the Chicago Tribune of the 19th containing a long interview, in which Mr. Blaine responds to some remarks about him as a civil service reformer which appeared some time ago in the Evening Post, with a column or two of personal abuse directed against me. The abuse being of the old Gail Hamiltonian pattern, and somewhat stale, calls for no reply. Neither am I in the least disposed to enter into a dispute with Mr. Blaine as to whether he or I was more faithful to the principles of civil service reform while in office. In fact, I should not take notice of the matter at all but for a rather amusing circumstance, more amusing even than such a dispute would be.
Mr. Blaine is known to be of a very dramatic disposition, and it is his characteristic method, whenever he feels himself attacked, to defend himself by an assault upon the accuser, and thus to entertain and divert the public by the spectacle of a lively fight between individuals. So in this instance. Mr. Blaine was sure that the article in the Evening Post which reflected upon him was from the pen of Mr. Schurz, who is, as Mr. Blaine sweepingly remarks, of all men, “studiously and gratuitously offensive in all he says.” Mr. Blaine identified the hand of his antagonist beyond doubt, and then he sallied forth in his characteristic style. Now, I cannot resist the temptation to spoil the dramatic combination by saying that Mr. Blaine has directed his tirade to an entirely wrong address. When the Evening Post discussed Mr. Blaine as a civil service reformer I was quietly enjoying my summer vacation—more than 200 miles from New York, equally ignorant of Mr. Blaine's new pretensions as a civil service reformer and of what the Evening Post was going to say about him. If, therefore, he wants to remain true to his method of meeting a charge by reviling the accuser, he will in this case have to abuse somebody else.
I do not, however, say this for the purpose of suggesting that he ought not to abuse me. I have to admit that he has sufficient reason for it. Although I am not the author of the Evening Post article in question, and might have preferred to treat Mr. Blaine's new reform attitude good-naturedly as the rich joke which he himself undoubtedly feels it to be, and, although I am anxious to see full justice done to him in the Evening Post according to the facts, yet there is another disturbing difference between us beyond the civil service question. To make a clean breast of it, it consists in my entertaining, as Mr. Blaine knows, quite seriously the opinion that the author of the Mulligan letters will, in spite of “booms” and “plumes” and reform professions, never get votes enough to be elected President of the United States. And, as I not only entertain this opinion, but have sometimes expressed it, Mr. Blaine cannot be expected altogether to restrain his feelings.