Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/312

 and the protector of that magna charta the king of Prussia, the same king who on the 18th of March had put himself at the head of the movement for German unity and freedom. The realization of this idea had been the great hope of the nation. But the king of Prussia had refused to complete the work of national unity by declining the imperial crown. He had dissolved the Prussian constituent assembly, which had urged him to accept the charge, and thereby annihilated the possibility of an agreement with the people, and with it also all hope of the accomplishment of social reforms. Then nothing had remained but an appeal to arms. He too, the accused, had taken up his musket, and he declared now in the presence of his judges his belief that he had done right. He stood to-day by the acts he had committed in the preceding May. What he had done, he had done as a patriot and a man of honor.” He went still farther in his avowal. He called himself a socialist—although in the now-accepted party sense Kinkel had really never been that. He had never been an adherent of any of those systems which contemplate a complete subversion of the traditional institutions of society. When he called himself a socialist he meant only that, as he said, “his heart was always with the poor and oppressed of the people, and not with the rich and powerful of this world.” He expressed, therefore, only those sympathies which had taken possession of so many hearts, and in order to designate them he chose the name of socialist because it was nearest at hand. “And because I am a socialist,” Kinkel continued, “therefore I am a democrat, for I believe that only the people themselves can feel their own deep wounds and cleanse and heal them. But because I am a democrat, because I consider the democratic state as the only and certain possibility to banish misery from the world, therefore I also believe that when a people have once won