Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/458

 whenever he came to think them wrong; he boasted, as partisans should, that he had never so changed his mind as to be obliged to go out of his party: “I have never betrayed my principles; I have never betrayed my friends; I have never betrayed those who elevated me to power, and sought to use that power for their destruction.” Schurz's reply combined sharp criticism with an epigrammatic expression of his philosophy of political action: “I want him to point out in my record a single principle that I ever betrayed. I want him to show in the platforms of policy I have favored a single contradiction. He will not find one. He has never left his party; I have never betrayed my principles. That is the difference between him and me.”

It is always difficult for a man of Schurz's qualities to conceal a certain righteous indignation at the evasions and ignorance of presumptuous politicians. Logan, whose forte was heat rather than light, would have been insufferably exasperating if he had not often displayed an amusing lack of information and of logic. Schurz evidently believed Morton to be insincere rather than ignorant. To that Senator's oft-repeated and pompous cant—that the peculiar circumstances of the United States warranted deviation from sound economic principles—Schurz replied in these words: “Sir, when I want to discuss mathematics or geometry with anyone I shall require him to assent to certain fundamental propositions before we proceed; for instance, the proposition that two and two make four, and that a straight line is the shortest way from one point to another. When a gentleman who wants to discuss mathematics or geometry with me asserts that two and two make four in another country but not here, and that the proposition that a straight line is the shortest way from one point to another may have been believed in five hundred years ago,