mortification if it is to be thrown away. But I repeat that it is impossible to carry this system to a successful issue without general approval and assistance and positive law to support it."

In all the circumstances this was common sense, and Curtis recognized it later when he said: “A President who should alone undertake to reform the evil must feel it to be the vital and permanent issue and must be willing to hazard everything for its success. He must have the absolute faith and the indomitable will of Luther, 'Here stand I; I can no other.'... General Grant, elected by a spontaneous patriotic impulse, fresh from the regulated order of military life, and new to politics and politicians, saw the reason and the necessity of reform. . . . Congress, good-naturedly tolerating what it considered his whim of inexperience, granted money to try an experiment. The adverse pressure was tremendous. 'I am used to pressure,' smiled the soldier. So he was, but not to this pressure. He was driven by unknown and incalculable currents. He was enveloped in whirlwinds of sophistry, scorn, and incredulity. He who upon his own line had fought it out all summer to victory, upon a line absolutely new and unknown was naturally bewildered and dismayed. . . . It was indeed a surrender, but it was the surrender of a champion who had honestly mistaken both the

nature and the strength of the adversary and his own power of endurance."

Grant did not then receive the credit as a pioneer which history must assign him. He had no gift for advertising his own wares, and he was so lacking in a politician's artifice that in the eyes of critics some of his very merits wore the guise of faults. In this as in too many other things he was the victim of his honesty.

Grant's interest in the Indians dates from his life in the Far West, when as a young army officer he saw with what injustice they were treated by the whites. George W. Childs says that he "then made up his mind if he ever had any influence or power it should be exercised to try to ameliorate their condition." He was as good as his word. Brief as was his first inaugural, it was long enough to contain a reference to "the proper treatment of the original occupants of this land," as deserving careful study. "I will favor any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship." He appointed an Indian Commission headed by William Welsh, of Philadelphia, whom Hayes later made Minister to England, and composed largely of leading members of the Society of Friends, which he pointed out in his annual message of December, 1869, "is well known as having succeeded in living in peace with the Indians

in the early settlement of Pennsylvania while their white neighbors of other sects in other sections were constantly embroiled." He adopted the novel policy of giving all the agencies to such religious denominations as had established missionaries among the Indians, the societies selecting their own agents subject to the approval of the Executive. In his second annual message, he wrote: "I entertain the confident hope that the policy now pursued will in a few years bring all the Indians upon reservations where they will live in houses and have schoolhouses and churches and will be pursuing peaceful and selfsustaining avocations and where they may be visited by the law-abiding white man with the same impunity that he now visits the civilized white settlements." Here we have the first serious attempt at a humanitarian treatment of the Indian by the Government - the germ of whatever benefit has come to him as the nation's ward. Yet Grant was duly censured because an Indian ring infested the Interior Department as had been the case before his day and has been ever since.

"The most troublesome men in public life," said Grant a few years later, "are those over-righteous people who see no motives in other people's actions but evil motives, who believe all public life is corrupt, and nothing is well done unless they do it

themselves. They are narrow-headed men, their two eyes so close together that they can look out of the same gimlet-hole without winking." Fish in his "Diary" tells how during the San Domingo controversy Grant remarked: "It is strange that men cannot allow others to differ with them, without charging corruption as the cause of difference. . . . There is little inducement other than a sense of duty in holding public position in this country - but for that I do not know what there is to induce a man to take either the place I hold, or one in the Cabinet, and were it not for that I would resign immediately." Remarks which help us better to understand the loyalty with which he stood behind those men in his Administration who were most violently assailed.

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE GREELEY EPISODE

AMONG the public men of the Reconstruction period Carl Schurz had a place peculiarly his own. Never a force of much constructive influence he was for years a striking figure, an irrepressible critic, an apostle of unrest, who though not popular himself had popular repute. A Prussian by birth, a revolutionist and refugee of 1848, he came to comprehend the theory of American institutions as few Americans have comprehended it, yet in the very atmosphere of liberty he remained a revolutionist and dissenter to the end. He never became completely Americanized or localized. He lacked the "homing instinct." After leaving his native country, he lived successively in Switzerland, France, and England, and coming to the United States in 1852 he fluttered over Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Missouri, before finally alighting in New York. He never remained long with any political group or respected party fealty.

Minister to Spain at the beginning of the war and afterwards a brigadier-general of volunteers, he was unsparing in censure of his military and civilian superiors. His admonitions at a trying moment in the