THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
the morning, secured a place which she continued to occupy every day throughout the trial. The public prosecutor moved in Kinkel's case the penalty of death. The testimony of the various witnesses brought out the facts of the case as they were generally known; the public prosecutor, as well as the attorneys of the defendants, pleaded their causes with coolness and skill. My friend and fellow-student, Ludwig Meyer, made a manly speech in his own defense, and at last, on the 2d of May, Kinkel himself asked to be heard.
The assembled audience, aye, the whole nation, were in a state of anxious expectancy. People asked one another: “What will he say? Will he humiliate himself, and bow his head like a penitent sinner? Will he present the picture of a broken and thenceforth harmless man in order to purchase grace? Or will he defy those in power by maintaining all his former professions, by standing by what he has said and done, and thereby forfeit the last claim to a mitigation of his awful lot?” The grievously suffering man would probably have been forgiven by public opinion had he by a yielding attitude sought an alleviation of his misery.
Kinkel's speech in his own defense was a full answer to all these questions, in the highest degree imposing, and touching at the same time. He began with a concise description of the public situation in Germany after the revolution in March, 1848. “The people,” he said, “had then won their sovereignty. This sovereignty of the people had been embodied in the constituent assemblies elected by universal suffrage—in the Prussian assembly in Berlin, as well as in the national parliament in Frankfurt. It had so been understood by all the world. The national parliament had proceeded with signal moderation; it had created a magna charta of popular rights in a constitution for the empire, and it had elected as the head of the em-
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