THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
and all its pretended heroism. It is a matter of experience that not a few of the most bellicose students, devoid of just this genuine and higher courage, become the most servile sycophants of power in later life, always parading the scars on their faces as proof of their bravery. In this way a class of unprincipled climbers has developed itself, which depends in the competition for place and promotion, not on its real ability and true merit, but on social connections and the protection of the powerful, and which thus loses in the matter of character what it wins in the way of success.
Such were the views about the duel held in my time by the Franconians, although it is certain that they were not lacking in sense of honor nor of pride. Their principles, however, did not keep them from the fencing school; indeed several of them would have been conspicuously able to enforce respect sword in hand. I have to confess that I found especial pleasure in the fencing exercises, and Spielhagen praises me in his memoirs “for wielding a deft and powerful blade.”
In other respects we followed the customs and enjoyed the pleasures of German student-life to our hearts' content. We wore with pride the society colors on our caps and the tricolored ribbon across our breasts. We celebrated our “commerses” and went through all the traditional ceremonies with becoming solemnity. We took long rambles into the country—and it was no pedantic affectation, but a real outflow of gay spirits that on such occasions some of us who had studied our Homer with especial assiduity conversed in homeric verses, which somehow we contrived to apply to what we were doing or observing. We also indulged in delightful excursions up and down the Rhine and into its lovely side-valleys; and blessed be the memory of the innkeepers who did not demand an immediate settlement of our accounts; blessed above all,
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