Nor can I fail to speak with pride of those American citizens of German blood, who hold their rank among the best of our people by their industry, their civic virtues, their conservative spirit and their self-sacrificing patriotism, which has drenched every American battlefield with Teutonic blood. It may well be said of them that, however warm their affection for their native land, they have never permitted that affection to interfere with their duties as American citizens, and, least of all, to seduce them into any design or desire to use their power in American politics for foreign ends. And of the services they are doing this Republic it will not be the least valuable that their presence on our soil helps to preserve that peace and friendship between the two nations, which, happily, has always existed to the benefit and honor of both and which, of late, such wicked attempts have been made to disturb without cause. May that peace and friendship endure forever.
And now a last word, which may be fittingly uttered on an occasion like this. I have reached the age which may speak from experience; and of the experiences of my long public activity I will give you the best.
If there is any one among us who has lost faith in democratic government—in what Abraham Lincoln called “Government of the People, for the People and by the People,”—I am not that man. Indeed, our democratic government has had its failures and will have more. Honest and earnest criticism of those failures—even, if need be, the most searching and merciless,—is a good citizen's duty. So is the pointing out of threatening dangers. But criticism and the pointing out of danger must never have the object of discouraging wise and vigorous effort for improvement. If they do, they degenerate into that dreary pessimism which, whenever something goes wrong, cries out that everything is lost. If the pessimist, who
