CARL SCHURZ'S POLITICAL CAREER
erate praise from the Independents and immoderate abuse from the spoilsmen. During the second year, with party spirit intensified through the conflicts of the Republican Senate with the President, the trend of things was very distinctly adverse to the reformers, and the sources of praise and censure were transposed. Throughout all this fluctuation of policy, however, the conformity of the administration to the merit system so far as it had been embodied in the Pendleton Act was unquestioned. It was not his fidelity to the law, but his fidelity to his pledge about removals that was the core of the strife between the reformers and the spoilsmen.
Mr. Schurz followed the course of the administration with absorbing interest and anxiety. Every important episode in connection with the civil service called forth letters to the President in which the early invitation to Schurz to express his views “at length” was in general interpreted with liberality. Hearty praise or frank censure were bestowed upon Cleveland's acts according to their relations to Schurz's ideals. The two men had and always retained great respect and admiration for each other's personality; but their fundamental political creeds were quite distinct. Cleveland was a Democrat, with Independent sympathies; Schurz was, in the existing party situation, an Independent pure and simple. Schurz felt in his heart that the natural purpose of the President to promote the further success of the Democratic party was both hopeless and undesirable. Yet in judging the President's acts the critic wisely adopted the President's point of view, and invariably represented the thorough and unfaltering application of reform principles as indispensable to the future welfare of the Democracy. Toward the end of 1886 Mr. Schurz became convinced, with all the more radical reformers, that the current of presidential favor had turned definitely against their ideals.
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