THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
thinking. “I am not a democrat,” he went on, “and cannot be. I was born an aristocrat and brought up an aristocrat. To tell you the truth, there was something in me that made me instinctively sympathize with the slaveholders as the aristocratic party in your civil war. But,” he added with earnest emphasis, “this vague sympathy did not in the least affect my views as to the policy to be followed by our government with regard to the United States. Prussia is and will steadily be by tradition as well as by well-understood interest, the firm friend of your republic, notwithstanding her monarchical and aristocratic sympathies. You may always count upon that.”
He asked me a great many questions concerning the political and social conditions in the United States, the questions themselves, in the order in which they were put, showing that he had thought much on those things and that he already knew much about them—in fact more than any European I had met, who had never been in this country. What new information I could give him he seemed to receive with great pleasure. But again and again he wondered how society could be kept in tolerable order where the powers of the government were so narrowly restricted and where there was so little reverence for the constituted or “ordained” authorities. With a hearty laugh in which there seemed to be a suggestion of assent, he received my remark that the American people would hardly have become the self-reliant, energetic, progressive people they were, had there been a privy-counsellor or a police captain standing at every mud-puddle in America to keep people from stepping into it. And he seemed to be much struck when I brought out the apparent paradox that in a democracy with little government things might go badly in detail but well on the whole, while in a monarchy with much and omnipresent government, things might go very pleasingly in detail but
[ 277 ]
