Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/91

Rh natural rights of man by direct National legislation. He was not free from that dangerous tendency to forget the limits which bound the legitimate range of legislative and governmental action. On economic questions his views were enlightened and thoroughly consistent. He had studied such subjects more than is commonly supposed. It was one of his last regrets that his health did not permit him to make a speech in favor of an early resumption of specie payments. On matters of international law and foreign affairs he was the recognized authority of the Senate.

But some of his very shortcomings served to increase that peculiar power which he exerted in his time. His public life was thrown into a period of a revolutionary character, when one great end was the self-imposed subject of a universal struggle, a struggle which was not made, not manufactured by the design of men, but had grown from the natural conflict of existing things, and grew irresistibly on and on, until it enveloped all the thought of the nation; and that one great end appealing more than to the practical sense, to the moral impulses of men, making of them the fighting force. There Mr. Sumner found his place and there he grew great, for that moral impulse was stronger in him than in most of the world around him; and it was in him not a mere crude, untutored force of nature, but educated and elevated by thought and study; and it found in his brain and heart an armory of strong weapons given to but few: vast information, legal learning, industry, eloquence, undaunted courage, an independent and iron will, profound convictions, unbounded devotion and sublime faith. It found there also a keen and just instinct as to the objects which must be reached and the forces which must be set in motion and driven on to reach them. Thus keeping the end steadily, obstinately, intensely in view, he marched