Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/388

 twenty men in the field. Whereupon General McNeil promptly answered: “Yes, but that was long after the beginning of the war”—an answer which made Mr. Drake sink back into his chair, while the meeting burst out in a peal of laughter. Soon he rose again to say that I was wrong in imputing to him any hostility to the Germans, for he was their friend. My reply instantly followed that then we had to take what he had said of them to-night as a specimen of Mr. Drake's characteristic friendship. The audience again roared with laughter. But the sharpest arrow was still to be shot. I reviewed the Senator's career as a party leader—how he had hurled his anathema against every Republican who would not take his word as law, thus disgusting and alienating one man after another, and now seeking to read out of the party every man and every newspaper, among them the strongest journal in the State, that supported me. Almost every sentence drew applause. But when I reached my climax, picturing Mr. Drake as a party leader so thinning out his following that he would finally stand “lonesome and forlorn, surrounded by an immensity of solitude, in desolate self-appreciation,” the general hilarity became so boisterous and the cheering so persistent, that I had to wait minutes for a chance to proceed. I closed my speech in a pacific strain. There had been talk that, if I were elected, the unseemly spectacle would be presented of two Senators from the same State constantly quarreling with one another. I did not apprehend anything of the kind. I was sure, if we ever differed, Senator Drake would respect my freedom of opinion, and I certainly would respectfully recognize his. Our watchword would be: “Let us have peace.”

When I had finished, there was another outbreak of tumultuous applause and a rush for a handshake, the severest I have ever had to go through. With great difficulty I had to work