Page:Schurz Birthday 27.JPG

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27

amongst the names he mentioned foremost because of their attainments, enthusiasm and faultless eloquence, was that of Carl Schurz of Bonn. [Applause.] That was my first acquaintance with him, who, at that early time, was characterized by our spokesman as the knight without fear and without reproach. [Applause.]

In the early part of 1849 his name reached me when in Göttingen. After perpetual mission work on the shores of the Rhine in the service of the revolutionary idea, he and Professor Gottfried Kinkel, philosopher, poet, orator, planned an attack on an arsenal, were unsuccessful, and fled to the Palatinate and Baden, to join the revolution which was to protect the endangered German Parliament against the armies of conquering Prussia. To meet him I found impossible, for the police gobbled up everybody whose face was turned to the south. I could but follow his career from battlefield to battlefield, and finally to Rastatt, where, in July, 1849, the bulk of the revolutionary army was caught in a trap. Many of his comrades were then shot, amongst them students, savans, army officers, government officials, members of parliament. His friend and teacher had been caught and was landed in a State prison, as they thought, for life. Schurz, however, preferred to escape through a subterranean sewer from the belly of the fortress. As he was an officer in a prominent position, his fate, if he had been caught, would not have been doubtful.

Then we, who were in our precarious homes, heard of and from the exiles in Switzerland, France and England; of him always in the glowing terms of appreciation and admiration. He was uppermost in the estima-