Page:Addresses in Memory of Carl Schurz.pdf/28

 the only atmosphere, for national as for individual growth in virtue. He also perceived that democratic government could be various and elastic, and that it had indefinite recuperative power after disaster. The whole of his subsequent career as a public man was based on these convictions of his youth. Thirty-five years later appeared his “Life of Henry Clay,” his largest piece of literary work. It is much more than a life of Clay, being also a powerful delineation in rapid outlines of the political history of fifty pregnant years. Its style is simple, clear, and fluent, its judgment of men and public acts temperate and impartial, and its moral teaching always both lofty and attractive. No biography of an American public man has been written with greater discernment, candor, and fairness. That it was written by a German who came to this country at twenty-three years of age, after practical experience of the crude and visionary revolutionism of Europe in 1848, and then entered on the study of the English language and of American political principles, is an intellectual and moral marvel. It demonstrates the consistency and continuity of Carl Schurz's own principles of political action from youth to age.

Schurz at once attached himself to the liberal or progressive side in American politics, and in the first instance to the anti-slavery cause. What gave him power to serve greatly the cause of freedom was his gift of genuine oratory, both in English and in German. His command of English for purposes of public speech was extraordinary. I have listened to many scholars and lecturers of foreign birth speaking in English after years of familiar use of the English tongue, but I have never heard one who approached Carl Schurz in the accuracy, variety, and idiomatic quality of his English speech. In his essays and speeches one may find occasionally a word which a native would hardly use in the sense in which he uses it, but the most attentive critic will fail to find ungrammatical phrases or misused idioms. Now and then a sentence will recall by its length the German style; but its order, inflection, and rhythm will be English. His oratory was never florid or rhetorical as distinguished from logical. On the contrary, it was compact, simple, and eminently moderate