Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/380

346 I proposed new institutions or alterations in the old, and so much influence in public councils—for I was but a sad speaker. Never eloquent, subject to much hesitation in my choice of words, hardly correct in language, and yet I generally carried my points.

It was the wonderful persuasiveness of the superior mind which sympathetically identified itself with the inferior understanding.

As a politician, a popular leader, a statesman, too, he exercised his consummate faculty of identifying himself in intellect and standpoint with those upon and through whom he had to work. He never quarreled about trifles. He avoided quarreling even about important things. He never hated anybody except George III.

He was a successful man in his private affairs (and showed by his example how one who began wretchedly poor may accumulate enough to sustain a great and conspicuous position in life), not by streaks of good luck or any uncommon business enterprise or effort, but by observing certain very ordinary rules of thrift, industry and prudence, intelligible to all and, it might be said, within the opportunities of almost all. It has been said by some that his wisdom had been, after all, nothing but the picayunish wisdom of the narrow-minded penny saver and somewhat out of date now. Those who say so forget that Franklin also taught how a fortune penuriously won may be generously risked or spent for great ends; for the same Franklin unhesitatingly put his whole fortune in jeopardy to help General Braddock in his expedition; what to him was an enormous sum, he lent to the Continental Congress, when the chances of the American Revolution looked extremely uncertain. He offered to make himself liable for the tea thrown into Boston harbor, if thereby a just policy toward America could be