Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/218

194 desiring to avoid persons whose ill-will or indiscretion might have brought me into touch with the constituted authorities. It was then that a “mutual friend” introduced Jacobi and me to each other during a dark night in an out-of-the-way little garden house, having described him to me as a young man who could be absolutely depended upon in every respect and under all circumstances. And as the man who can be depended upon in every respect and under all circumstances, I have known and loved him ever since; and if we could live together another half century, I should be ready to vouch for him in that sense every day of the year and every hour of the day.

At the period of which I have been speaking our intercourse was very short. We travelled together a day or so—he going to Schleswig-Holstein where, as a budding physician, he expected to do service in the capacity of a volunteer surgeon in the war then going on, and I to the field of my operations. Several years later we met again in the city of New York. He had in the meantime suffered in our native country long imprisonment for his active and self-sacrificing desire to make the people free and happy; and then he sought and found a new home in this great Republic in which, if the people do not create or maintain conditions to make them free and happy, it is their own fault.

I have been asked to speak of Dr. Jacobi as a citizen, and I may say that the manner in which he got into jail in the old country—for I have to admit the fact that he did serve two years in state prisons, whatever you may at the first blush think of it—indicated at that early day very clearly what kind of a citizen he would make in this Republic. He was one of the young men of that period who had conceived certain ideals of right, justice, honor, liberty, popular government—but which they cherished and believed in with the fullest sincerity, and for which they