Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/437

Rh He looked upon it as his personal affair which concerned nobody else. A painful but still reluctant apprehension was then dawning upon the minds of some that the conduct of this great Government had fallen into the hands of a trifler. The distribution of offices was now in order, and the President began at once to shower the sweets of his official patronage upon his relatives and personal friends. He had probably never heard of nepotism, and was undoubtedly the last man to feel the indecency of his conduct. Regarding the Presidency as an accommodation to him, and its appendages as a sort of personal property, he did not see why he should not increase his own comfort by making his kinsfolk and favorites comfortable with the offices of the Republic. Likewise it did not strike him as scandalous to reward men who had given valuable presents, with high and responsible dignities. He simply liked to please those who had pleased him—that was all. He found it unreasonable, therefore, that in the gratification of that desire the opinions of others should stand in his way. He surely believed that the fault-finders were meddling with things which belonged to him, and were no business of theirs. Neither did he find it reasonable that the man to whom the Presidency had been given as a reward should be hampered by legal obstructions; and when he found an old and wise statute standing in the way of the appointment of his first Secretary of the Treasury, and the tenure-of-office act troubled him in distributing the patronage, he simply said to Congress, “Just repeal me these laws!” That the repeal of such laws might lead to very mischievous consequences troubled him little; they stood in his way, and that was enough for him.

Soon after his accession to power he gave his mind, not to the great problems the solution of which the people anxiously looked for, but to a project of his own