Page:Visit of the Hon. Carl Schurz to Boston, March 1881.pdf/33

20 present may remember, I was, so to speak, introduced by public men of Massachusetts to the American people as one of the advocates of the Antislavery cause. Later, when Charles Sumner had departed from the living, the city of Boston deemed me worthy to express her appreciation of the patriotic career, and her grief at the loss, of one of her most illustrious sons. Still later, I was honored with a call to aid in public debate in one of your State contests, when the cause of honest money and public faith seemed to be at stake. And more recently, in a controversy concerning the Indian problem, referred to by our honorable chairman, my name has been discussed in Massachusetts with a warmth of interest which could not have been greater had I been a native citizen of your Commonwealth, and had I lived in it and been of it all the days of my life. It is not surprising, therefore, that I should not feel like a stranger among you; friend and foe here have treated me as one of your own, and I am perfectly at home with both.

The measure of praise you have been kind enough to award to me for my administration of the Interior Department is—I say this without any affectation of modesty—perhaps too generous. I know better than any body else that my administration has not been perfect. The Interior Department is not only the most difficult, it is also the most dangerous, department of the Government. It is so cumbrous and overgrown an accumulation of hete-