virtual founder of this museum; gratitude toward the governing boards of the university who have given it a temporary abode; gratitude toward the numerous friends who have assisted it; gratitude to the workmen through whose skill its treasures were installed. May its career justify the care and generosity bestowed upon it by so many. May it come to be an embodiment of the spirit held before us by the names of the three great men to whose memory this day, the 10th of November, is sacred: St. Martin, the representative of mediaeval charity and civic devotion; Luther, the apostle of modern independence and individual striving; Schiller, the prophet of the society of the future.
The Chairman: “Ladies and Gentlemen, when the Germanic Museum Association was formed, to make propaganda for our cause in this country and abroad and win for it as many friends as possible, it was natural that we should choose as President of that association the man whose name would most strongly appeal to Germans and Americans alike, the man who had set a shining example to all of us millions of German-Americans by serving his adopted country as a soldier, a statesman, a historian, an orator, an ardent advocate of good government, without losing one particle of his loyalty to his native country,—the Honorable Carl Schurz.”
ADDRESS BY THE HONORABLE CARL SCHURZ.
The establishment of a Germanic Museum as a part of this renowned American University signifies more than a mere collection and exhibition of things historically or artistically remarkable. It is an offspring of the tendency, growing and spreading among civilized nations, to recognize the community between them of thought, of intellectual achievement, of moral endeavor, and of ideal aspirations. It is more particularly an expression of the instinctive desire of the Germanic branches of the human family which, although now separated by political lines of division, claim a common origin and which have made so deep and so peculiar an impress upon the progressive civilization of the human race as to bring to clearer consciousness their
