Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/471

Rh Senator Doolittle, who affords himself and the world so much amusement by his sepulchral wit, as well as his exhilarating profundity, has grown particularly eloquent. In a speech made by him in the city of Washington some time ago, he delivered himself of the following wonderful disclosures:

They (meaning the Republicans in Congress) have established from the Potomac to the Rio Grande a military despotism more absolute than any other in any civilized country within the last two hundred years. If you sit down by the grave of Washington you sit in the shadow of a military government more despotic and absolute than any in Poland or Hungary or Ireland. They have heaped upon the people of the South more of oppression and of indignity than can be found in all the history of Europe since the barbarous proceedings of the Duke of Alva against the Dutch Republic.

When such childish nonsense is uttered by a sensational penny-a-liner, or a little demagogue at a ward meeting, or Andrew Johnson, we let it pass; but when a grave Senator of the United States, who pretends to respectability, rises before the people and compares the military governments in the South with the atrocities committed in Hungary and Poland, he deserves chastisement. He must be either more ignorant than the merest schoolboy ought to be, or have a fondness for wilful misrepresentation incompatible with the character of a gentleman. I understand Senator Doolittle has been travelling in Europe. It appears he might have spent the time very profitably in requesting some little German boy to give him a bit of elementary information upon European affairs. He might then have learned that, after the failure of the Hungarian revolution, a long row of gallowses was erected, on which the most prominent of the Hungarian generals were hung. He might have learned