Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/370

346 They may expose to the proper pathological light the hysterics which seemed to unsettle the minds of a great many people when the President greeted at his table the same distinguished citizen, who had already been received by Queen Victoria at tea at Windsor Castle, and who is known and admired throughout the civilized world as a man of extraordinary merit, but whose presence at the President's board was frantically denounced as an insult to every white citizen of this Republic, and as a dangerous blow at American civilization.

They may with great effect describe how civilized man kind would have laughed at the American gentleman who might have refused to sit at table with Alexandre Dumas, the elder, one of the greatest novelists of all ages and a most charming conversationalist and companion, for the reason that Dumas's grandmother had been a negress and Dumas himself must therefore be sternly excluded from polite society as a “nigger.”

To the lofty people who, for fear of compromising their own dignity, scorn to address a colored man as Mr. or a colored woman as Mrs. or Miss, they would give something to think of by reminding them of the stateliest gentleman ever produced by America, a man universally reverenced, a Virginian, who, when a negress, and a slave, too, had dedicated to him some complimentary verses, wrote her an elaborate and gravely polite letter of thanks, addressing her as “Miss Phyllis” and subscribing himself “with great respect, your obedient humble servant, George Washington.”

They will appeal to Southern chivalry, a sentiment which does not consist merely in the impulse to rush with knightly ardor to the rescue of well-born ladies in distress, but rather in a constant readiness to embrace the cause of right and justice in behalf of the lowliest as well as the highest, in defense of the weak against the strong, and this