Page:Addresses in Memory of Carl Schurz.pdf/18

 the choicest example of that splendid host of Germans who have enriched and strengthened and fertilized our native stock, to produce that composite creature, the latest result of time, the blending of all the Caucasian races—the New American.

With intense devotion he applied himself to mastering the English language, that he might with free speech utter free thought to free men throughout the whole land of his adoption. The year before the arrival of Mr. Schurz I had heard Kossuth himself, who in a few months had learned the English language in an Austrian dungeon, deliver to a Harvard audience an address in our own tongue. But Mr. Schurz as a linguist surpassed even Kossuth, for he soon became one of our foremost orators, perhaps the most cogent and convincing debater of his time; and if his hearers shut their eyes and trusted only to their ears they might well believe that he had never spoken any language but our own.

With an inherent instinct for freedom, he was at one with Lincoln, that “a house divided against itself must fall, and that this government could not permanently endure half slave and half free,” and so he took part in German in that great debate with Douglas, and made the vast hosts of his countrymen in the West familiar with the vital issue in that irrepressible conflict. In the convention of 1860 that nominated Lincoln, he insisted successfully, with Curtis, upon incorporating in the platform the cardinal principles of the Declaration of Independence. When the war broke out, and it became manifest that the Gordian knot of slavery could be cut only by the sword, he resigned the lazy post of Minister to Spain, and on many a bloody field—at Manassas, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Chattanooga—with dauntless skill and courage he fought for freedom here as he had fought for it at home.

As a senator I think he made the noblest record of his noble life. There his genius, his courage, his humanity, and his patriotism had full play. There politics, patronage, the chance of re-election were nothing to him. He was there not to serve his State only, but the whole country, in the true spirit of Burke's letter to the electors of Bristol. With exhaustless energy he