Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/52

18 in any sense the character of our service or of the officers in it; it is the almost unavoidable peculiarity of their training and situation, for which they are in no way responsible. Their duties may be arduous; but, except in places of highest command in active warfare, they are extremely simple, specific and narrow; and it is a common experience that the mental horizon of men is apt to become limited by the sphere of their duties. I have heard it said a hundred times by men who had spent the best part of their lives in the regular army, and then were thrown upon their own resources to make a living in ordinary pursuits, that their army life had unfitted them for the every-day tasks of society. They found them selves, in a multitude of cases, utterly bewildered by the competition they had to run with those who had been trained in civil pursuits. How is it possible to assume that men who have spent the best part of their lives, who have grown old in that exclusive atmosphere, should show particular fitness for the most complex and confusing of all duties, the highest civil office in the land?

It may be said, therefore, without exaggeration, that in a hundred cases to one, by taking an old regular army officer, who has never been anything else, and putting him into the highest and most difficult political position, you may spoil an excellent general in making a poor President.

There he is, with an honest intention to do right and to serve his country. Problems of financial policy suddenly rise up before him—questions of revenue, of commercial policy, not in the way of general maxims and vague principles, but in the mysterious shape of practical problems to be applied to a given state of circumstances; questions of party politics, where the interests of the public and of the party are curiously mixed together in bewildering confusion. The man at the head of affairs