THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
his, he accorded the honor of even a condescending consideration. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it. I remember most distinctly the cutting disdain with which he pronounced the word “bourgeois”; and as a “bourgeois,” that is as a detestable example of the deepest mental and moral degeneracy he denounced everyone that dared to oppose his opinion. Of course the propositions advanced or advocated by Marx in that meeting were voted down, because everyone whose feelings had been hurt by his conduct was inclined to support everything that Marx did not favor. It was very evident that not only he had not won any adherents, but had repelled many who otherwise might have become his followers.
From this meeting I took home with me a very important lesson: that he who would be a leader and teacher of men must treat the opinions of his hearers with respect; that even the most superior mind will lose influence upon others if he seeks to humiliate those others by constant demonstrations of his superiority. That public man will be most successful in enlightening and winning the ignorant who puts himself upon their standpoint, not with condescension, but with sympathy.
On the whole the summer of 1848 was to me a time of work and worry. The newspaper for which I had to write articles, the agitation in clubs and popular meetings, and besides my studies, imposed upon me a very heavy burden of labor, in which—I must confess—my studies fell into a somewhat subordinate place. What troubled me most was the visibly and constantly growing power of the reactionary forces and the frittering away of the opportunities to create some-
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