merely lookers-on in Vienna. The Sunday afternoon before the convention was
to meet we, the self-elect, fell in with a party of these in a garden "over
the Rhine," as the German quarter of Cincinnati is called. There was first
general and rather aimless talk. Then came a great deal of speech making.
Schurz started it with a few pungent observations intended to suggest and
inspire some common ground of opinion and sentiment. Nobody was inclined
to dispute his leadership, but everybody was prone to assert his own. It
turned out that each regarded himself and wished to be regarded as a man
with a mission, having a clear idea how things were not to be done. There
were Civil Service Reform Protectionists and Civil Service Reform Free
Traders. There were a few politicians, who were discovered to be spoilsmen,
the unforgivable sin, and quickly dismissed as such.

Coherence was the missing ingredient. Not a man jack of them was willing
to commit or bind himself to anything. Edward Atkinson pulled one way and
William Dorsheimer exactly the opposite way. David A. Wells sought to
get the two together; it was not possible. Sam Bowles shook his head
in diplomatic warning. Horace White threw in a chunk or so of a rather
agitating newspaper independency, and Halstead was in an inflamed state of
jocosity to the more serious-minded.

It was nuts to the Washington Correspondents--story writers and satirists
who were there to make the most out of an occasion in which the bizarre was
much in excess of the conventional--with George Alfred Townsend and Donn
Piatt to set the pace. Hyde had come from St. Louis to keep especial tab on
Grosvenor. Though rival editors facing our way, they had not been admitted
to the Quadrilateral. McCullagh and Nixon arrived with the earliest from
Chicago. The lesser lights of the guild were innumerable. One might have
mistaken it for an annual meeting of the Associated Press.