In the office Schurz was called “the General.” His subordinates found him genial, kindly, and appreciative, though his manner had a touch of military strictness. He left the news, financial, literary, and dramatic departments almost wholly to their various heads, but bent a watchful eye upon the musical criticism—he was an expert musician. Against only one change in the paper’s discipline were there any protests. W. P. Garrison, the son of the great Abolitionist, hastened to abolish the “filthy habit” of smoking in the offices, a rule that caused incalculable anguish among some of the veteran newspaper men; it is said that George Cary Eggleston’s early resignation was partly due to it. Schurz probably consented on the ground of the fire-hazard.

A few stories have come down showing “the General” as he worked, his tall form bent short-sightedly over his pad in a little space that he would grub out from the accumulated chaos of papers and letters on his desk. The famous Sullivan-Ryan prize-fight occurred in February, 1882, and when the first dispatches arrived, Linn, the news-editor, hurried to consult Schurz, telling him that under Bryant the Post had always thrown such news into the waste-basket. This was the fact: when the McCool-Jones fight occurred in 1867, the paper had suppressed a column from the Associated Press, and mentioned the “revolting” affair only in a short, tart editorial. But Schurz eagerly read the dispatches. “Mr. Linn,” he ordered, “publish a brief result of each round, and head it, ‘Brutal Prize-Fight’; and,” he added with a twinkle, “let me see a copy on each round as soon as it comes in.” Linn commented on returning to his desk, “The General is an old fighter himself.” This, however, was an unusual display of humor on Schurz’s part. There existed from the Civil War until 1918 a daily feature on the editorial page called “Newspaper Waifs,” consisting of several sticksful of jokes clipped from various sources. It was always popular; in 1894, after Godkin’s denunciation of his Venezuela message, Cleveland was asked whether he still read the Evening Post, and replied, “Yes—I read the waifs.” Schurz insisted on seeing the copy for the feature; and, to keep it alive, the managing editor found it necessary to include daily a half dozen poor and obvious jokes with the good ones. With unerring eye, glancing down the column, Schurz would o.k. the poor quips and cancel most of the others.

The majority of Schurz’s editorials naturally dealt with party politics and the affairs of the Federal Government. The assassination of Garfield (July 2, 1881) and the succession of Arthur to the Presidency, awakened much apprehension among editors of liberal views, which the Evening Post shared. For some time it found President Arthur’s conduct reassuring, but it soon had occasion to condemn a number of his appointments—notably his nomination of Roscoe Conkling to the Supreme Bench, which Conkling declined, and his selection of Wm. E. Chandler to be Secretary of the Navy—as evidence that he was introducing the methods of the New York machine into national politics. Garfield’s death made the question of the Presidency in 1884 important, and during 1883 the Post uttered frequent monitions that the nomination of Blaine would disrupt the Republican party and lead to defeat. A characteristic utterance by Schurz in July, 1883, contained some shrewd observations on party character as it appeared just a year before the campaign. The essential difference between the Democrats and Republicans, he wrote, was that the former had sterling leaders but a wrongheaded rank and file, while the latter had many pernicious leaders but a sound general body. Men like Cleveland, Bayard, Vilas, and Hewitt believed in civil service reform and hard money, while men like Blaine, Conkling, Arthur, and Wm. Walter Phelps believed in spoils and a high tariff; but the great mass of Democrats would try to drag the leaders down to their own level, while the mass of Republicans—so Schurz hoped—would turn their backs on Blaine and Arthur.

Early in 1883, when the question of Federal aid to the common schools was raised, an issue still important, Schurz wrote disapproving it, as an interference with the functions and self-reliance of the States. He had the gratification of hailing the Pendleton Civil Service Act, the first great step toward fulfillment of a reform on which he somehow found time to lecture as well as write. He defended the Chinese against unfair legislation in California, and argued constantly for a fairer policy toward the Indians. Perhaps his most important editorials were several in the latter half of 1882 arguing for an executive budget, beyond doubt the first elaborate demand for this reform made by any American editor. He wrote (August, 1882):

It is obvious how much in the way of bringing order out of chaos would be accomplished by introducing the practice of having a complete budget of necessary expenditures, and of the taxation required to cover them, prepared by the executive branch of the government, and submitted to Congress at the beginning of each session. What we have now is merely the estimates of the different departments of the amounts of money they want. What is needed is, aside from the grouping together of these amounts, showing the total sum required by the government for the year, a clear statement of the different kinds of existing taxes, with their yield, and the opinion of the Executive as to what taxes will best subserve the purpose, what taxes may be cut down or abolished, and so on. A clear summing up in a statement of this kind would be sure to attract the attention and to reach the understanding of every intelligent taxpayer....

By far the most interesting of Schurz’s editorials, however, were a number upon foreign topics. He wrote repeatedly upon the affairs of Germany, where Bismarck, given a free hand by the fast aging William I, was asserting the absolute power of the throne, passing anti-Socialist legislation, and otherwise taking a reactionary course which Schurz lost no opportunity to denounce. The editor pinned his hope of a better policy to the Crown Prince, the short-lived and noble-minded Emperor Frederick. From time to time Schurz would select news from the European press and illuminate it with his special knowledge. Thus in the summer of 1883, under the title “A Strange Story,” he wrote upon the trial of the Jews of a Hungarian hamlet on the charge of sacrificial murder; the editorial was pure narrative, but its effect was a caustic denunciation of religious bigotry. When in the fall of 1882 Gottfried Kinkel died, Schurz characterized his old German comrade as the incarnation of the vague, impractical idealism of 1848, an idealism that recked nothing of hard political realities; and his editorial contained a striking bit of reminiscence:

It was this spirit which seized upon Kinkel, who was then a professor extraordinary at the University of Bonn, lecturing on the history of art and literature. He was a poet of note; of an artistic nature, also, ardent and impatient of restraint. He was an orator of wonderful fertility of imagination and power of expression.... He preached advanced democratic ideas, and his political programme fairly represented the romantic indefiniteness of the whole revolutionary movement. When the reaction came, he left his professorship, his wife and children, and, gun in hand, fought as a private soldier in the insurrectionary army of Baden. In one of the engagements he was wounded and taken, and then sentenced to imprisonment for life, put into a penitentiary, clothed in a convict’s garb, and forced to spin wool—the mere thought of which touched every heart in Germany. Then he was brought from the penitentiary to be tried at Cologne for an attempt upon an arsenal, in which he had taken part—an offense not covered by the sentence already passed upon him. The court was thronged with spectators and with soldiers. He defended himself. Before he had closed his speech, which was like a poem, the judge, the jury, the spectators, the soldiers, the very gendarmes by his side, were melting in tears. His wife stood outside the bar, forbidden to approach him; but when in the agony of grief he called out to her to come to him, the soldiers involuntarily stepped aside to let her rush into his arms. It was as if all Germany had looked on and wept with those who were in the courtroom. Then he was taken back to the penitentiary and set to wool-spinning again, until in November, 1850, some friends aided him in escaping. Again the popular heart was stirred in its poetic sympathies. His whole public career was like the most romantic episode of a romantic time—a fair representative of the spirit of these days, their heroic devotion to an ideal, and their indefiniteness of aim.

Some striking editorials by Schurz and Godkin, denouncing the vicious operations of Jay Gould in connection with the Manhattan Elevated Railroad, had a dramatic sequel. Gould and his associates, enraged by them, determined to retaliate by a personal attack upon Schurz. In pursuance of this purpose, they concocted an ingenious double-barreled slander, aimed both at Schurz and Henry Villard. In substance, it was that as Secretary of the Interior Gen. Schurz had prostituted his rulings to the advancement of Villard’s railway interests, and had been given his shares in the Evening Post as a reward. Not only was this piece of mendacity worked up in detail in the World, which Jay Gould controlled, but it found its way into an article by George W. Julian in the North American Review for March, 1883. Schurz had a short way with the authors of malicious fabrications. During the Civil War Gen. Leslie Combs had charged him with cowardice at Chancellorsville, and he had instantly called Combs a liar and challenged him to a test of courage in the next battle. Now he blew Julian to pieces in the Evening Post of the week of March 26. The facts were that the “restoration” to the Northern Pacific of a forfeited land grant, the offense charged against Schurz, had been made in accordance with a ruling by the Attorney-General and not the Secretary of the Interior; that it was based upon principles applied in the same way to many other cases; that Henry Villard did not for nearly two years afterward have any interest in the Northern Pacific; and that, on the contrary, he was interested in a rival enterprise. It is unnecessary to say that those who had believed this story in the first place were few and simple-minded.

Of the breadth of Schurz’s influence there are many evidences. A few days after he took the editorial chair ex-President Hayes declared to him: “I must see what you write.... Mrs. Hayes will not forgive me if she loses anything you write.” The files of his correspondence, kept in the Congressional Library, indicate that a majority of Congress subscribed to the daily or semi-weekly Evening Post. The Secretary of the Treasury was glad to supply seven pages of information in his own handwriting upon a question of the day; and information for news or editorial use was volunteered to Schurz by a considerable list of consuls abroad. It was at this time that a young Atlanta lawyer named Woodrow Wilson contributed a series of articles upon conditions at the South—“entirely off my own bat,” writes ex-President Wilson. The Post was read by German-Americans all over the country, and many of its editorials were reprinted by German-language journals. That Schurz felt this nation-wide interest as a constant stimulus there can be no doubt. Always a hard worker, he gave his best energies to the newspaper in spite of constant demands for public addresses and magazine articles; he wrote in 1881 that he was at his desk daily from nine to four-thirty, and in 1883, when the editor of the American Statesmen Series requested him to finish his volumes on Henry Clay as soon as possible, he replied that his duties allowed him only parts of two or three evenings a week.

From the outset many friends of the Post had predicted that an editorship of “all the talents” would work no better than had the ministry of that character in England; and the prediction was soon verified. As Isaac H. Bromley, a humorist on the Tribune said—a witticism which Godkin sometimes repeated with enjoyment—“there were too many mules in the same pasture.” Schurz and Godkin had greatly admired each other before they were associated, and were entirely congenial in their rather aristocratic intellectualism and their views on political subjects; but their methods of appealing to the public were not merely different, but disparate. Schurz employed argument and calm exposition, while Godkin varied his argument with ridicule, cutting irony, and even denunciation. There is no doubt that before long Godkin came to feel that Schurz’s editorials were too narrow in range, and too arid in the mode of presentation. On the other hand, Schurz did not always approve of Godkin’s ironic humor, and thought that he was sometimes too savagely cutting in tone. Neither was satisfied with the editorial page. Indeed, Godkin’s dissatisfaction in the late spring of 1883 became so acute that he concluded that the Evening Post experiment was a failure, that the first impetus of the change had been lost, and that heroic measures were necessary to raise the level of the newspaper. He differed greatly from Schurz, he explained, as to the quality of the editorial writing, and wished to dismiss one staff member, Robert Burch, and employ in his stead some one especially good at writing pungent paragraphs. The result was an arrangement between Godkin and Schurz by which the latter agreed to relinquish the editorship-in-chief on Aug. 1, when he went on his summer vacation; with the understanding that if, after another two years, the dissatisfaction continued, Horace White should take Godkin’s place at the helm. Schurz duly left for his vacation, Burch was dismissed, and Joseph Bucklin Bishop, a brilliant young editorial writer for the Tribune, was brought on in his stead.