Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/485

 Office, position, influence, were opportunities to achieve distinction in advancing the causes for which he had earnestly enlisted. In one of his letters to Hayes during the campaign of 1876, he had written: “The first thing that I want is to promote certain objects of public importance and to that end to preserve, as a private citizen, some influence on public opinion and the esteem of those whose respect is worth having. I can do that first by telling the people what I honestly believe to be true and what I can reasonably prove to be true.” It was by close adherence to such rules of personal action that he became rich in “the esteem of those whose respect is worth having,” and was able to advance his favorite reforms. Such was the distinction he sought.

An instance that throws much light on the Secretary's methods and on the conditions with which he had to deal was that involving a woman clerk in the Patent Office, who was also the Washington correspondent of a prominent Republican newspaper in Ohio. Its editor early besought the Secretary to promote her, declaring that her work as correspondent during the last presidential campaign had been very efficient. By direction of the Secretary the woman's superiors in the Patent Office looked up her record as clerk, with the result that she was recommended for dismissal. Schurz ordered, however, that she be merely reduced in rank and that she have another chance to justify her retention. The editor soon blew a fierce epistolary blast on account of the treatment of his protégée, expatiating on the service she had done by her letters during the campaign, declaring her entitled to promotion on this score, and concluding with the warning so terrible to politicians, that whatever might be done in this case would be regarded as “directly personal” to the newspaper. To an impractical