Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/233

Rh other place exposed to the Southern breeze—but sure enough, all the particulars coincided, it was Boston, the great commercial and intellectual metropolis of the great and enlightened State of Massachusetts. I need hardly add that the paper which expressed so high satisfaction at an attempt to put down freedom of speech, had in the late campaign advocated the interests of Stephen A. Douglas, somewhat mixed up with those of Mr. Bell, and of the representative of American culture and refinement, Edward Everett. [Sensation.]

I must confess that the reading of that account filled my heart with sadness; not as though I had expected much good to arise from the meeting that was disturbed; for it was no doubt superfluous to discuss in Boston, the question how slavery can be abolished, at a time when the people of the Cotton States are so busily engaged in the material solution of that interesting problem; nor as though I had sympathized with the peculiar views to which that meeting was likely to give a public expression; for, as long as our fundamental laws are such as to keep the road of progressive improvement open, I shall always be opposed to every attempt to seek that progress outside of the laws; but the reading of that account made me sad, because it destroyed a delusion I had fondly indulged in. It was the delusion that in a city which surrounded the Cradle of American Liberty, which had listened to the most eloquent appeals in favor of human rights, and in which the most progressive features of American civilization are most successfully cultivated, that in such a city, I say, every educated man would appreciate the great agencies of progress and social order, to which we owe our moral and intellectual development and prosperity and power among the nations of the world. Indeed, of all countries on the globe, Massachusetts, and of all cities inhabited by civilized beings, Boston ought to