Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/119

Rh lectual head of the political anti-slavery movement. From him we received the battle-cry in the turmoils of the contest; for he was one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion, instead of tamely following its footprints. He would compress into a single sentence—a single word—the whole issue of a controversy; and those words became the inscriptions on our banners, the pass-words of our combatants. His comprehensive intellect seemed to possess the peculiar power of penetrating into the interior connection and grasping the general tendency of events and ideas, things and abstractions; he charmed our minds with panoramic views of our political and social condition and with the problems to be solved; his telescopic eye seemed to pierce even the veil which covers future developments; and while all his acts and words were marked by a thorough-going and uncompromising consistency, they were, and the same time, adorned with the peculiar graces of superior mental culture. [Cheers.]

The same qualities which made him the object of the fiercest and most acrimonious hostility on the part of our opponents, could not fail to assign to him, in the hearts of his friends, a place which hardly another man in the nation could fill. He was one of the earliest champions of our cause. He fought for it, sometimes single-handed and alone, standing firm and unmoved in the storm of fanaticism and vituperation; he fought for it when it was unpopular, and all the prejudice that existed against his principles, all the odium that was cast upon his doctrine, centred upon his person. He was the bugbear with which political children were frightened, and a great many were accustomed to couple with the name of Seward all that was detestable and dangerous. His principles emerged from that cloud of prejudice, but his name did