Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/313

Rh ate them very highly. All the more do I deplore your unwillingness to serve as a member of the committee of which Mr. Charles Francis Adams is the chairman.

I am probably not wrong in supposing the main reason for your refusal to be that we should trust President Roosevelt's determination to have a full and unsparing inquiry, and that therefore investigations by private and voluntary agencies are superfluous and will not bring forth results of value.

Now, the committee has not at all been instituted for the purpose of impeaching President Roosevelt's sincerity, or upon the assumption that he will not honestly try to accomplish the proclaimed object. On the contrary, it will rather stand by him and help his efforts. There is reason for supposing that the President has not been well served by his subordinates and that many important things have for a long time been withheld from his knowledge which he ought to have known; and it is very probable that those who thus have misled him in the past, will, for their own salvation, try to do so in the future.

It is a fact, of which I have the best evidence in my hands, that of the things which have startled the country, not a few have actually been brought out by those voluntary private agencies which you seem to consider unnecessary and valueless. Without those agencies the members of the Senate Investigating Committee, who really want to investigate, would have groped about in the dark, and those members will declare to you to-day that the services thus rendered are “inestimable.” The President in pursuit of the real truth may have occasion to say the same