Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/497

 resented by the section of the organization that had sustained the Grant régime, and Mr. Blaine also, with a large and enthusiastic following, assumed an attitude of opposition on this point. To both these factions the Secretary of the Interior became the favorite target for their spleen. In the summer of 1877 Mr. Whitelaw Reid, once closely identified with the reform movement which Schurz directed, opened the columns of the New York Tribune to a series of vitriolic lampoons by Gail Hamilton upon the administration, in the course of which the Secretary of the Interior received special attention. The political relationship of the editor, and the family relationship of the writer, to Mr. Blaine left no doubt as to the inspiration of these attacks. In the spring of 1878 the Senator from Maine himself entered the arena. Schurz had early in his term as Secretary instituted vigorous measures for ending the extensive and inveterate depredations of lumbermen upon the forests of the public domain. The action of the government was violently attacked on the floor of the Senate by Blaine, who represented Schurz's measures as a harsh and oppressive application of European methods, by an official of Prussian birth, to high-spirited and freedom-loving American citizens. From the Grant section of the party, also, came a particularly violent onslaught in March of 1878, through Senator Howe, of Wisconsin, though in this the offensiveness of Schurz's German nativity was reduced to the minimum, in view of the large foreign-born element in Wisconsin's population.

The Secretary's philosophy and sense of humor preserved him from discomfort under these attacks. All the ingenious innuendo which imputed un-American influence to him would disappear, he knew, when he should be again needed to win the German vote for the Republicans. Only once did he feel