Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/308

284 he did this upon the highest order of motives, as I know from my frequent conversations with him at the time. I think I am well warranted in affirming that he was the only man there who had much of real weight to say.

I have already expressed to you my dissent from your opinion that the Administration is always entitled to have a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and especially its Chairman, in harmony with its views and purposes. The San Domingo treaty made by an aide-de-camp of Grant, a treaty to which even the Secretary of State was at heart opposed, is a case in point. Should the Chairman of the Committee have been removed because he was opposed to that treaty? Should the present Chairman be removed if he were opposed to any of the reciprocity treaties now hanging in the Senate? Should that Chairman understand that he would rightfully forfeit his place if he dared to oppose any treaty sent into the Senate by the Administration? Would not that be a state of things utterly obnoxious to our Constitutional scheme of government? What would thus become of the Senate as an independent factor in the treaty-making function?

It was at the time asserted that Sumner had to be removed because he had ceased to be on speaking terms with the Secretary of State. If that in itself were a sufficient cause for such a removal, any Secretary of State might bring about the removal of any Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee simply by offending him so as to make further personal intercourse impossible. As a general rule this certainly cannot hold.

As you ask me especially to give you my opinion of your treatment of Sumner, I must repeat what I said at the beginning: that treatment savors of a sort of contempt which you probably, I may say certainly, did not intend to put into it. The reader will be apt to receive the impression that in your view Sumner was a rhetorician full