Page:Visit of the Hon. Carl Schurz to Boston, March 1881.pdf/27

14 country, so far as our names carry any influence or weight, that we believe that Carl Schurz, in the field, in the Senate, and in the Cabinet, has rendered services to the nation which rightfully place him in the foremost rank of her public men, and entitle him to the high respect and gratitude of all the people.

At the age of nineteen, in the foreign country in which he was born, he had become conspicuous for an ardent devotion to the great principles of freedom which have ever since guided and colored his political action. An exile and a refugee for liberty, he lands in early manhood upon the shores of America; and, frankly renouncing his German citizenship, he adopts as his country the nation which gives to him, as to all the oppressed from foreign lands, protection, freedom, and opportunity. To that nation he gives his full allegiance; and when her hour of danger comes, resigning an honorable post in her diplomatic service, he joins her patriotic sons born on her soil, and ventures his life in the war for Liberty and the Union.

Of the highest capacity for public affairs, and by nature and training a lover of politics in the best sense of the word, he set himself the task of comprehending the great ideas which underlie American constitutional government; and he has mastered them with the same thoroughness with which he has conquered the difficulties of the historic language, through the medium of which they have