Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/428

 categorically declared that he would not be a partisan; he was a “liberal Republican,” and specifically announced the liberal creed: “We desire peace and good will to all men. We desire the removal of political restrictions and the maintenance of local self-government to the utmost extent compatible with the Constitution as it is. We desire the questions connected with the Civil War to be disposed of forever, to make room as soon as possible for the new problems of the present and the future.”

The significance of this pronouncement was not misunderstood. It foreshadowed a political movement, on the lines of that recently successful in Missouri, against the policies and the men of the present Republican administration. It pointed to a readjustment of party lines and particularly to a firm resistance to the renomination of Grant. In the Senate the group of out-and-out anti-administration Republicans was small—Schurz, Ferry of Connecticut, Trumbull of Illinois, Tipton of Nebraska. Among the newspaper editors and other influential men of the party there was, however, a very widespread dissatisfaction with Grant. Greeley, Halstead, Horace White, and Samuel Bowles were especially outspoken and effective. However pure Grant's motives and intentions, his actual conduct of the administration had been far from praiseworthy. Through love of his friends and his relatives he had given office to an unusual number of wholly unqualified persons, who had brought discredit upon him as well as themselves. His gratitude to the Congressmen who had sustained his Dominican policy had turned the federal civil service in a number of States into a mere machine for the promotion of personal political ends. Morton in Indiana, Conkling in New York, Chandler in Michigan, Cameron in Pennsylvania and Butler in Massachusetts, for example, were autocrats of their respective States through the patronage bestowed by the President.