Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/133

 Such exhortations were, of course, at the time mainly aimed against the Democratic party. But I soon found occasion to advocate their general and impartial application. As soon as my task in Illinois was finished, about a week before election day, I returned to Milwaukee, where a very animated contest was going on, and I was at once pressed into service. I plunged into the struggle with great alacrity. The object was to secure the election of the Republican candidate for Congress in the First Congressional district of Wisconsin, and to defeat certain Democratic candidates for municipal offices, who were accused of corrupt practices. The election was expected to depend mainly upon the “German vote” in Milwaukee. Until then a large majority of the Germans had supported the Democratic party for the reasons I have already set forth. But the local issue of “honest government” now helped greatly in shaking their party allegiance and thus in turning the tide. The result was a sweeping Republican victory. A fortnight after the election a public meeting was held to celebrate the event, at which, in response to some very laudatory remarks by other speakers concerning my share in the successful campaign, I made a speech which, in the collection of my addresses published in 1865, I entitled “Political Morals.” In this speech I expressed with great emphasis my ideas of the relation between the individual citizen and his political party; and as those ideas, then somewhat impulsively uttered, have remained substantially unchanged throughout my long life, and have at various times determined my conduct in critical situations, and exposed me to much aspersion, and seriously affected my political fortunes, the reader of these reminiscences may kindly forgive the somewhat liberal quotations.

I called attention to the fact that the recent victory had been won by the votes of the citizens of German nativity who