Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/529

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—Summoned by the German societies of New York I stand here to give expression to the feelings which have been aroused in us by the death of the first Emperor of the reborn German nation. Not for a promulgation of political creeds are we met. Here I see before me native Americans to whom the German Empire is a foreign land. Even the honored chief of our National Government, members of his council, the presiding officers of the two houses of Congress, the governor of our State, the mayor of our city, and more, the father of American history, as well as other lights of science, are, if not in person, at least with their expressed sympathies, here present. And as to us German-born: I see here the strict republican, and by his side the man who in his native land was an equally strict monarchist. I see here survivors of those who, after the year 1848, after unsuccessful struggles for honest convictions, sought the shores of the New World as refugees, hardly believing then a day could come when, without breaking faith with themselves—for a self-respecting man does not hesitate to be truthful and just—they would unite with the younger generation in the funeral cortège of one of the princes who had sent them into exile. Before you stands one of them, who lost many friends under the iron hand of the Prince now mourned, and who himself escaped from that iron hand with difficulty and peril.

But whatever may be our origin and our antecedents, here we are assembled as citizens of the great American Republic, to which belongs our faithful devotion. We remember well the old and wise rule of this Republic