Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/77

Rh not do otherwise. He did so, frequently and without hesitation and reserve, when Mr. Lincoln was President. He continued to do so ever since, the more loudly, the more difficult it was to make himself heard. It was his nature; he felt it to be his right as a citizen; he esteemed it his duty as a Senator.

That, and no other was the motive which impelled him. The rupture with the Administration was brought on by his opposition to the Santo Domingo treaty. In the reasons upon which that opposition was based, I know that personal feeling had no share. They were patriotic reasons, publicly and candidly expressed, and it seems they were appreciated by a very large portion of the American people. It has been said that he provoked the resentment of the President by first promising to support that treaty and then opposing it, thus rendering himself guilty of an act of duplicity. He has publicly denied the justice of the charge and stated the facts as they stood in his memory. I am willing to make the fullest allowance for the possibility of a misapprehension of words. But I affirm, also, that no living man who knew Mr. Sumner well will hesitate a moment to pronounce the charge of duplicity as founded on the most radical of misapprehensions. An act of duplicity on his part was simply a moral impossibility. It was absolutely foreign to his nature. Whatever may have been the defects of his character, he never knowingly deceived a human being. There was in him not the faintest shadow of dissimulation, disguise or trickery. Not one of his words ever had the purpose of a double meaning, not one of his acts a hidden aim. His likes and dislikes, his approval and disapproval, as soon as they were clear to his own consciousness, appeared before the world in the open light of noonday. His frankness was so unbounded, his candor so entire, his ingenuousness so childlike, that he lacked even the