Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/86

60 a filial love,—of whom he was so proud, who had honored him so much in days gone by, and whom he had so long and so faithfully labored to serve and to honor! Oh, those were evil days, that winter; days sad and dark, when he sat there in his lonesome chamber, unable to leave it, the world moving around him, and in it so much that was hostile,—and he prostrated by the tormenting disease, which had returned with fresh violence,—unable to defend himself,—and with this bitter arrow in his heart! Why was not that resolution held up to scorn and vituperation as an insult to the brave, and an unpatriotic act—why was he not attacked and condemned for it when he first offered it, ten years before, and when he was in the fullness of manhood and power? If not then, why now? Why now? I shall never forget the melancholy hours I sat with him, seeking to lift him up with cheering words, and he—his frame for hours racked with excruciating pain, and then exhausted with suffering—gloomily brooding over the thought that he might die so!

How thankful I am, how thankful every human soul in Massachusetts, how thankful every American must be, that he did not die then!—and, indeed, more than once, death seemed to be knocking at his door. How thankful that he was spared to see the day, when the people by striking developments were convinced that those who had acted as he did, had after all not been impelled by mere whims of vanity, or reckless ambition, or sinister designs, but had good and patriotic reasons for what they did;—when the heart of Massachusetts came back to him full of the old love and confidence, assuring him that he would again be her chosen son for her representative seat in the House of States,—when the lawgivers of the old Commonwealth, obeying an irresistible impulse of justice, wiped away from the records of the legislature, and from the fair name of the State, that resolution of censure which