CARL SCHURZ'S POLITICAL CAREER
other officeholders had been ordered to desist from. Mr. Cleveland declined to permit him, any more than any other officeholder, “to embarrass and discredit me in what I know and you know … to be honest efforts to give the people good government.” The President later apologized for this letter, confessing that it was written under the influence of great irritation. The cause of this feeling was obviously the expectation that the League would strongly denounce the administration. Curtis' presidential address did indeed set in strong light the wide gap between the administration's performance and the reformers' hopes; but the criticism seems to have been less offensive than the President had anticipated. The Newport speech, Cleveland wrote, “has given encouragements that will bear bad fruits,” and “has certainly made it a little harder for me”; yet he construed it “quite differently from those who desired to make capital out of it against the administration.”
Mr. Schurz naturally expressed unqualified approval of Curtis' address. It is the business of the Mugwumps, he wrote Curtis, to stand up boldly and demand extremes in reform, even though they are charged with demanding the impossible. The uncompromising spirit of reform thus manifested was hopelessly irreconcilable with the party programme which the President was now preparing, and so it came about that, without any rupture of personal friendship, the relations between Schurz and Cleveland lost for a time the intimacy which had prevailed since 1884.
During these years of earnest effort to influence the political current, Mr. Schurz had formally entered the field of literature. In the winter of 1884-85 he traveled for four months through the South, visiting all the States except Mississippi. His purpose was partly to acquire material for his proposed
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