Thus the Liberal Movement of 1872.

Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He was an idealist--not quite
yet a philosopher. He had his friends about him. Sam Bowles--the first
newspaper politician of his day, with none of the handicaps carried
by Raymond and Forney--a man keen of insight and foresight, fertile of
resources, and not afraid--stood foremost among them. Next came Horace
White. Doric in his simplicity like a marble shaft, and to the outer eye
as cold as marble, but below a man of feeling, conviction and tenacity,
a working journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. A little group of such
men formed itself about Schurz--then only forty-three years old--to what
end? Why, Greeley, Horace Greeley, the bellwether of abolitionism, the
king bee of protectionism, the man of fads and isms and the famous "old
white hat."

To some of us it was laughable. To Schurz it was tragical. A bridge
had to be constructed for him to pass--for retrace his steps he could
not--and, as it were, blindfolded, he had to be backed upon this like a
mule aboard a train of cars. I sometimes wonder what might have happened
if Schurz had then and there resigned his seat in the Senate, got his
brood together and returned to Germany. I dare say he would have been
welcomed by Bismarck.

Certainly there was no lodgment for him thenceforward in American
politics. The exigencies of 1876-77 made him a provisional place in the
Hayes Administration; but, precisely as the Democrats of Missouri could
put such a man to no use, the Republicans at large could find no use for
him. He seemed a bull in a china shop to the political organization he
honored with a preference wholly intellectual, and having no stomach for
either extreme, he became a Mugwump.

III

He was a German. He was an artist. By nature a doctrinaire, he had
become a philosopher. He could never wholly adjust himself to his
environment. He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest
truthfulness and genuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor
ceased to regard him with the enduring affection one might have for an
ardent, aspiring and lovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who
could not and perhaps did not desire to understand him.... To him the
Southerners were always the red-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he
had fancied and pictured them in the days of his abolition oratory.
More and more he lived in a rut of his own fancies, wise in books
and counsels, gen