Harper's Weekly/Mr. Schurz Commended
WE have had so much to say of late in criticism
of Mr. Schurz and his recent
conduct that it is a pleasure to set down a
word of commendation for an act of positive
self-sacrifice in behalf of the public weal. Mr.
Schurz's resignation of the Presidency of the
National Civil Service Reform
Mr. Schurz
commended
League is the best evidence, if
any were needed, of his interest in
the welfare of that organization, as well as of the
principles for which it stands. Any one who
supposes that it was an easy thing for Mr. Schurz
to do when he wrote his letter of resignation would
better study the story of Brutus, who condemned
his own son to death, and draw a parallel. If there
has been one thing in the universe beside his
temperament to which Mr. Schurz has been consistently
true it is the principle of Civil Service Reform.
Whether allied to the Republican party or to
the Democratic, whether on the crest of the wave
of success or struggling in the undertow of
defeat, in the face of scorn, contempt, ridicule, in
fair weather as well as in foul, he has been its
ardent champion, suffering such slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune in its behalf as would have
overwhelmed most other men, never for once yielding
up a jot of his devotion to it. He has lived it,
dreamed it, breathed it — it has been the very soul
of his political soul, and now be bows his head in
sorrow and bids it farewell. It must be said that
the nation owes a great debt to Mr. Schurz for his
insistence upon its principles. It must not be
forgotten in summing up the substance of Mr.
Schurz's career that he, with the late
Dorman
B. Eaton and George William Curtis, of cherished
memory, more than any other men, forced its
principles into the warp and woof of our public
life, and the deep gratitude which is owed to him,
as well as to them, must not be withheld because
in his latter days he has chosen to abandon the
field in which he has shone conspicuously as a
patriot, in behalf of an issue which in the days of
his intellectual vigor he would have been the first
to make mock of.
It is an encouraging sign to those of us who have despaired over the case of this good man gone wrong that he so fully realizes the enormity of his present course that be withdraws himself from active contact with an association which his new alliance would cover with real shame and contempt. It does not mean the complete abandonment of righteous principles by Mr. Schurz, as some are unkind enough to suggest. We prefer to believe it the first step of the late President of the League toward that reformation for which his best friends have been praying, the initial point of which is the realization by the offender of his own unworthiness.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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