Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/220

196 society, yield obedience to that power as readily as if it were a monarch with soldiers and jailers at his heels. Indeed, the moral courage of conviction against adverse currents is the most necessary, but, I apprehend, not the most general of civic virtues.

Those who know our friend here as well as I do will agree with me that he possesses that civic virtue in a rare degree, and may emphatically be called a man never afraid, a man of that grim independence which is bent upon thinking right and doing right, no matter what others may think or do. There has hardly been an earnest effort for the enforcement of correct principles of government, or for the vindication of justice and right, or against evil practices or demoralizing tendencies in our public concerns, since Dr. Jacobi became a citizen of this Republic, that he did not vigorously support in his effective, although quiet and unpretentious way, no matter whether other people liked it or not, or what it might cost him. I need not go into detail and tell of his services as a member of the famous Committee of Seventy, or as a co-worker with the Chamber of Commerce in cholera times, and in various other ways which, although equally, if not even more meritorious, have never come to public notice. Moreover, he was not only animated with a warm enthusiasm for high ideals and the accomplishment of important public objects, but also with that healthy righteous wrath which abhors and attacks not only sin in the abstract, but the sinner in the concrete—a wrath far more wholesome to a democracy like ours than that facile and pliable tolerance which holds that sin is bad, to be sure, but that to disturb a sinner of respectable position would be to indulge in ungenteel personalities.

As in the realm of science he has always been the personification of scientific conscience, so in the realm of civic duty he has always been the personification of civic