Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/59

Rh my brother, I always felt that this must be a mistake. It struck me at once that you could not have been so foolish as to confide to a party of serenaders your secret intention to commit treason against the Republican cause and to join the Democrats. I am altogether too smart to be caught by such nonsense, as you are too honest to have any such designs. Come, let us embrace.”

In fact, sir, when I read my colleague's speech in the papers I enjoyed it so much that I refrained from correcting the misrepresentation in the same public manner; for it would have been a pity to disturb the intense and grave satisfaction with which my colleague was peddling that preposterous story from town to town, to have it laughed at by his hearers just as heartily as by myself.

And from evidence of this character, rivaling the immortal Buzfuz with his “chops and tomato-sauce,” my colleague drew a most ingenious conclusion, which, with the same intensity of satisfaction, he conveyed to the people of Missouri, as follows:

I believe that General has nurtured the more daring thought of marching the entire German mass of the Republican Germans of the United States over to the Democracy, to secure the election of a Democratic President in 1872, over whose Administration he may exert an influence as supreme as his aid in its election was efficient. It is the old idea of “a power behind the throne greater than the throne itself.”

Is my belief on this point unreasonable? If General does not mean this, what meant his dark hint in February, 1869, just before taking his seat in the Senate, when, in answer to New York Germans, who had presented him an address, he spoke of new ties to be formed by him in the future, and of his “arriving at different conclusions from those held by the persons who had then addressed him”?

Sir, this case is becoming more and more grave all the time. The future of the Republic seems to be trembling