There was Sumner--the great Sumner--who had quarreled with Grant and Fish, to keep him company and urge him on. There was the Tribune, the puissant Tribune--two of them, one in New York and the other in Chicago--to give him countenance. There was need of liberalizing and loosening things in Missouri, for which he sat in the Senate--they could not go on forever half the best elements in the State disfranchised. 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, gentle in his relations with the few who enjoyed his confidence; to the last a most captivating personality.