Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/251

Rh presently miss that open confidence to which you had been accustomed. This will be the case especially if under these circumstances you accept a regular nomination for Congress. I beg of you to think this all out for yourself. You are a young man. You have the great advantage of affluent circumstances. You have the promise of an honorable and useful career before you. That promise will certainly not be damaged if you follow a noble impulse at the risk of temporarily compromising your party standing and of obscuring the prospect of immediate preferment. A young public man rather strengthens him self in the esteem of those whose esteem is most valuable, even when they do not wholly agree with him, by an act of obedience to his best impulses, which at the same time is manifestly an act of unselfishness. A standing thus achieved is the moral basis of a career such as you would choose for yourself and as your most desirable friends will be proud to aid you in accomplishing.

But that promise may be fatally damaged in another way. The course you are in danger of following, as it takes you out of the fellowship of those with whom so far you have been bound together in sympathy and confidence, will unite you more and more in fellowship with the opposite element, the ordinary party politicians. The more you try to satisfy them, the less will you satisfy yourself. The result will be a disappointment all the more bitter as you then will see reason to reproach yourself for not having done the right thing, which was also the natural thing, at the decisive moment.

Believe an old and experienced friend, my dear Mr. Lodge, who tells you that you cannot afford to take the regular Republican nomination for Congress this autumn. You cannot afford to do it as a matter of ordinary prudence, were you ever so firmly convinced of being right with regard to the Presidential ticket. A young man may