Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/31

 I might call a sense of the logic and also of the music of the language.

When I began to write in English—letters or other more pretentious compositions—it happened to me not infrequently that in reading over what I had written I stopped at certain forms of expression I had used, doubting whether they were grammatically correct. I then sometimes tried to substitute other forms; but almost invariably I found, upon consulting competent authority, that the phrase as I had, following my instinct, originally put it down, was better than the substitute. In less than six months after I had begun this course of study I was sufficiently advanced to carry on a conversation in English about subjects not requiring a wide knowledge of technical terms, with tolerable ease, and to write a decent letter.

Since becoming known as a speaker and writer in English as well as in German, I have often been asked by persons interested in linguistic studies or in psychological problems, whether while speaking or writing I was thinking in English or in German, and whether I was constantly translating from one language into the other. The answer was that, when speaking or writing in English, I was thinking in English; and, when speaking or writing in German, I was thinking in German; and when my mind followed a train of thought which did not require immediate expression in words, I was unconscious of what language I was thinking in.

I have also often been asked in which language I preferred to think and write. I always answered that this depended on the subject, the purpose, and the occasion. On the whole, I preferred the English language for public speaking, partly on account of the simplicity of its syntactic construction, and partly because the pronunciation of the consonants is mechanically easier and less fatiguing to the speaker. I have preferred