Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/100

 and vociferously, not seldom with a sort of fanatical ferocity, resent and repel everything that seemed to threaten the power or prestige of their party, and who, in some instances, had established a sort of partisan lordship and sought to exercise a political terrorism over their neighbors.

Such persons would denounce me as an impudent young intruder who, having but recently come to this country, dared to invade the circle of their influence and to teach older citizens how to vote. They tried by all sorts of means, even by threats, to keep people away from my meetings. They interrupted my speeches by cat-calls and other disturbing noises. Occasionally they went even so far as to break the windows of the halls in which I spoke by throwing stones or other even more disagreeable missiles. Thus I had in my first campaign to meet party spirit in a form not only unfair but positively brutal. This disquieted me not a little. I was conscious of meaning no harm to anybody and of having no selfish ends in view. The cause I advocated seemed to me self-evidently right and just—the cause of liberty, of human rights, of free government, in which all men had a common and equal interest. I advocated that cause with arguments the correctness of which I was profoundly convinced of and which I thought must irresistibly appeal to the reason and the sense of justice and the patriotism of every fair-minded citizen. The same cause was advocated by a large number of high-minded and patriotic men who for this purpose had cut loose from their old party associations. The arguments brought forward by the other side appeared to my unsophisticated mind simply barbarous and revolting, direct insults to the spirit of the century, so far as they were intended to justify the institution of human slavery, or merely quibbling as they insisted upon constitutional obstacles to the exclusion of slavery from