Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/538

 Curtis lived closer to letters than Schurz; and Schurz, closer to politics than Curtis. They first met and became friends when both were young men and members of the Republican National Convention of 1860. The victory that Curtis there achieved through oratory caused the principles of the Declaration of Independence to be incorporated into the Republican platform and gave Schurz a recollection which he, nearly half a century later, called one of the most inspiring of his life. Twelve years after that occasion Curtis heard Schurz's speech about the sale of arms to France, and pronounced it “unquestionably altogether the finest speech I ever heard.” The most beautiful and appropriate eulogy of Curtis came from Schurz, who said: “And as he was the ideal party man and the ideal Independent, so he might well have been called the finest type of the American gentleman.”

The time, attention and manual labor devoted by Mr. Schurz to the one matter of civil-service reform would have been enough for the average man well past his sixtieth year. No detail of the movement in either national, State or city administration failed sooner or later to demand his attention and profit by his advice. With President Cleveland he discussed, less lengthily and impatiently but not less candidly than in the first term, the shortcomings of the departments in respect to the spirit of the reform. Governor Morton, by whose election in 1894 the long domination of the Hill-Tammany combination in New York State was ended, was skillfully influenced to give effective if somewhat wavering support to much-needed extensions of the reform at Albany. When Governor Black, who succeeded Morton, adopted the cause of the spoilsmen and proceeded to “take a little starch out of the civil service,” Mr. Schurz headed a delegation of protest against the bills and made an address, March