Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/61

Rh purpose, and transferred from one party to another at pleasure, he gives us his idea of the motives which govern the German-born citizens of this country on political matters. In his speech at Hannibal he appealed to the native prejudice, referring to the tariff question in the following language:

For my part all my sympathies are with the industries of my own land, and not with any other country of Europe or on the face of the globe. But General is a German; perhaps he might not be expected to have quite as warm sympathies for the industries of America as for the industries of his Fatherland.

As a piece of demagogism my colleague would consider it in anybody else of rather a low order, as low, I think, as a small politician may be capable of; and I use this strong term because not I alone am assailed, but because the patriotism of a very numerous, and I may say a very valuable class of our population is categorically called in question. In explaining it I shall have to return to my pathological hypothesis. To accuse me, because I was born a German, of a propensity to sacrifice the interests of this to the interests of a foreign country, and thus to stigmatize German nativity as the source of unpatriotic feeling, and this in the face of that spirit of self-sacrificing devotion which but yesterday led far more than a hundred thousand German-born citizens upon all the battlefields of the Republic, where their blood was as freely shed as that of any class of American citizens, and to do this in the position of a United States Senator and a professed spokesman of the Administration, is a thing so utterly repugnant to the commonest common-sense, so frantically preposterous, so ridiculously unjust, that the explanation on the pathological theory is the last refuge of the psychologist.