Page:Schurz Birthday 09.JPG

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could not, under our plan, give him their votes, or seek his leadership. The unwisdom of a system that encourages provincialism, and that denies to the nation the constant public service of the best and most capable of its citizens, the speaker believed to have been clearly shown. In every field in which Mr. Schurz had been active he had displayed the greatest of abilities and the loftiest character. In his long public experience he had in a sense served the highest of constituencies, and whether in the halls of Congress or the councils of the President, or as the private citizen, his voice and pen had never failed to give expression to what he conceived to be in the interest of the highest public good.

The first period of Mr. Schurz's career, that of his participation as a youth in the movement for constitutional liberty in Germany, was covered by Dr. A. Jacobi, who had served in the same cause. Dr. Jacobi told of the part taken by the young men of the German Universities in the great uprising of 1848, and of the first prominent appearance of Carl Schurz—a youth of nineteen—as a delegate from Bonn in the Student's Congress in the Wartburg. He referred to the later exploits of Mr. Schurz as an officer in the Revolutionary Army, of his career from battlefield to battlefield, and of his escape from imprisonment after the disaster of Rastatt. He told also of the brilliant rescue of Gottfried Kinkel, Schurz's teacher and friend, from the fortress of Spandau, an episode that attracted the