and which Sumner
denounced. It was Sumner's contention that the Civil War was prolonged
by British aid and that a demand for national damages (perhaps
$2,000,000,000, or Canada, by way of substitute) ought to be advanced.
So tense did the international situation become in 1869 and 1870 that
friends of peace were frightened. Boundaries, fisheries, and general
claims aggravated the situation, which was given into the hands of a
Joint High Commission, hastily summoned to meet in Washington in 1870.
The resulting Treaty of Washington, and the successful arbitrations
which followed it, eliminated Sumner's extreme contention but vindicated
the main American claims and founded Anglo-American relations on a more
secure basis than they had ever known. It was Grant's great triumph, but
it was a political danger as well, for the negotiator in charge, Charles
Francis Adams, loomed up as the possible presidential candidate of the
Republican dissenters.

The Liberal Republicans included the enemies of Grant as well as
dissatisfied reformers of all sorts. Carl Schurz, the great
German-American independent, was their leader. Horace Greeley, whose
_Tribune_ had done much to make the Republican party possible, gave them
his support. Charles Francis Adams was not indifferent to them. Salmon
P. Chase wanted their nomination. Young newspaper men, like Whitelaw
Reid and Henry Watterson, tried to control them. And the new group of
civil service reformers, disappointed in Grant, hoped that the new party
would take a step toward better government. At Cincinnati, in May, 1872,
they met in mass convention, and nominated Horace Greeley and Gratz
Brown. Their platform denounced Republican reconstruction, urged the
return to self-government in the South, and advocated civil service
reform, specie payments, and maintenance of public credit. The schism
became more threatening when the Democrats saw a chance through fusion,
and nominated the same candidates at Baltimore in July.

No quainter political figure has appeared in America than Horace
Greeley, thus transferred from his editorial office to the stump. Long
used to the freedom of the press, he had advocated many things in his
lifetime, had examined and exploited unpopular social reforms, had
contradicted himself and retraced his tracks repeatedly. The biting
cartoons of Nast exploited all these; but no contrast was so absurd as
that which brought to the great denouncer of slavery and the South