Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/445

Rh rescuing it from the treachery of political peddlers and parasites.

The highest praise he bestowed on James Russell Lowell in his magnificent eulogy, was in these words, which he might have spoken of himself:

Literature was his pursuit, but patriotism was his passion. His love of country was that of a lover for his mistress. He resented the least imputation upon his ideal America, and nothing was finer than his instinctive scorn for the pinchbeck patriotism which brags and boasts and swaggers, insisting that bigness is greatness, and vulgarity, simplicity and the will of the majority the moral law.

As portrayed by his own utterances this was George William Curtis as a public character and a public teacher—the ideal party man—for he always strove to the utmost to hold his party true to its highest aims; and the ideal independent, being true to his principles, his convictions of right and the commands of his conscience even against the behests of his party. And as he was the ideal party man and the ideal independent, so he might well have been called the finest type of the American gentleman.

He was intensely proud of his country without ever being boastful. He would have stood in the company of kings without embarrassment, but also without making any demonstrative display of his feeling himself at ease. He was not ashamed of not being rich. Indeed, he took good care not to become rich, by voluntarily assuming and laboriously working to pay off obligations of friends and associates, to which he could never have been legally held, and for which only a most susceptible sense of honor could detect any sort of responsibility on his part. He possessed that true politeness which consists in an