Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/545

 Republicans in their campaign in Ohio. The declination was, though courteous, prompt and decisive. Two grounds were given: first, that the effort to elect Seth Low as mayor of New York was keeping Schurz very busy; and second, the Republican platform of Ohio would make it “rather irksome to me to appear in that campaign.” Both reasons involved a fundamental antagonism to the President's party: the support of Low in New York signified among other things a deadly hostility to the State leadership of T. C. Platt, who was reputed to be very influential with the administration; and the repudiation of the Ohio platform meant antipathy to the tariff policy which had only in July taken legislative form in the Dingley Act.

More than five years had now (1897) elapsed since Mr. Schurz retired from business with the expectation of devoting himself to the writing of history. Of systematic study in the field of his projected work on the Civil War nothing had even engaged his serious attention save a long and unfinished essay on Charles Sumner. A short study of Lincoln had appeared in 1891, and was at once generally pronounced a classic; and it was expected that Mr. Schurz's intimacy with Sumner and sympathetic view of his policies would some day do as much for the historical repute of the Massachusetts Senator as the earlier study had done for the great President.

But however deep the interest of Mr. Schurz in the past, it could never overcome the demands of the present. Besides the questions of politics—national, State and municipal—in which the extent of his active participation has been indicated, a multitude of private or only semi-public enterprises and occasions appealed, and rarely in vain, for the aid and entertainment of his attractive oratory.