“Carl Schurz,” said Pulitzer, “was the most industrious and the least energetic man I have ever worked with. A word from him at that crisis would have completely routed Blair and squelched Brown. It was simply not in him to speak it.” Greeley was nominated amid a whirl of enthusiasm, his workers, with Whitelaw Reid at their head, having maintained an admirable and effective organization and being thoroughly prepared to take advantage of the opportune moment. It was the logic of the event that B. Gratz Brown should be placed on the ticket with him. The Quadrilateral was nowhere. It was done for. The impossible had come to pass. There rose thereafter a friendly issue of veracity between Schurz and myself, which illustrates our state of mind. My version is that we left the convention hall together with an immaterial train of after incidents, his that we had not met after the adjournment—he quite sure of this because he had looked for me in vain. “Schurz was right,” said Joseph Pulitzer upon the occasion of our yachting cruise just mentioned, “I know, for he and I went directly from the hall with Judge Stallo to his home on Walnut Hills, where we dined and passed the afternoon.” [Illustration: Mrs. Lincoln in 1861.] The Quadrilateral had been knocked into a cocked hat. Whitelaw Reid was the only one of us who clearly understood the situation and thoroughly knew what he was about. He came to me and said: “I have won, and you people have lost. I shall expect that you stand by the agreement and meet me as my guests at dinner to-night. But if you do not personally look after this the others will not be there.” I was as badly hurt as any, but a bond is a bond and I did as he desired, succeeding partly by coaxing and partly by insisting, though it was devious work. Frostier conviviality I have never sat down to than Reid’s dinner. Horace White looked more than ever like an iceberg, Sam Bowles was diplomatic but ineffusive, Schurz was as a death’s head at the board; Halstead and I through sheer bravado tried to enliven the feast. But they would none of us, nor it, and we separated early and sadly, reformers hoist by their own petard. VI The reception by the country of the nomination of Horace Greeley was as inexplicable to the politicians as the nomination itself had been unexpected by the Quadrilateral. The people rose to it. The sentimental, the fantastic and the paradoxical in human nature had to do with this. At the South an ebullition of pleased surprise grew into positive enthusiasm. Peace was the need if not the longing of the Southern heart, and Greeley’s had been the first hand stretched out to the South from the enemy’s camp—very bravely, too, for he had signed the bail bond of Jefferson Davis—and quick upon the news flashed the response from generous men eager for the chance to pay something upon a recognized debt of gratitude.