Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/439

Rh then urges and supports the laws which express it. But as public opinion is necessarily so powerful with us, we fear and flatter it, and so pamper it into a tyrant. How the country teems with conspicuous men. scholars, orators, politicians, divines, advocates—public teachers all, whose speeches, sermons, letters, votes, actions, are a prolonged, incessant falsehood and sophism; a soft and shallow wooing of the Public Alexander and the Public Cromwell, telling him that he has no crook in his neck and no wart on his nose. How many of our public men and famous orators have said not what they thought, but rather what they supposed we wanted to hear? In a system like ours, where almost every man has a vote, and votes as he chooses, public opinion is really the government. Whoever panders to it, is training a tyrant for our master. Whoever enlightens it, lifts the people to ward peace and prosperity.

To teach the people what they OUGHT to desire, that is the office of patriotic leadership.

He pursued this subject with the intensest earnestness.

Patriotism [he said to the graduating class of Union College], patriotism is like the family instinct. In the child it is a blind devotion; in the man an intelligent love. The patriot perceives the claim made upon his country by the circumstances and time of her growth and power, and how God is to be served by using both opportunities of helping mankind. Therefore his country's honor is as dear to him as his own, and he would as soon lie and steal himself as assist or excuse his country in a crime. Right and wrong, justice and crime, exist independently of our country. A public wrong is not a private right for any citizen. The citizen is a man bound to know and do the right, and the nation is but an aggregation of citizens. If a man shouts: “My country, by whatever means extended and bounded, my country right or wrong,” he merely utters words such as those might be of the thief who steals in the street, or of the trader who swears falsely