CARL SCHURZ'S POLITICAL CAREER
find room in the galleries. This was agreed to, and in a few minutes every sofa and every square foot of standing room in the chamber were filled. This audience was indeed inspiring and he never in his life spoke with so much nervous energy, fire and immediate effect. The crowd on the floor and in the galleries would at last break out at every touch, and the presiding officer found it very hard to restrain them. When Schurz finished, the larger part of the audience, after having indulged themselves in all sorts of demonstrations, rose to depart, and proceedings in the Senate had to be suspended for about a quarter of an hour. When the orator was just closing, Mrs. Schurz, who had after all been too restless to stay at home, arrived at the Senate chamber and tried in vain to get in. In a moment the crowd began to pour out, and Sumner, who was looking for some friends, met her in the lobby and, stretching out his hands, cried: “Oh, Madam, I congratulate you. Your husband has just made the greatest speech that has been heard in the Senate for twenty years.” “It was indeed,” said Schurz, in recalling this incident to Sumner's biographer many years later, “not the best speech, for the subject was comparatively small, but the greatest parliamentary triumph I ever had in the Senate.”
To break the effect of Schurz's remarkable eloquence, which all the newspapers of the land acknowledged and recorded, his adversaries turned their batteries almost exclusively upon him and his personal aims. Morton represented him as seeking merely to turn the German vote over to the Democrats, and dwelt with special iteration upon Schurz's public declaration that he would not support Grant under any circumstances. Conkling pressed again the intimation made before, that Schurz, in order to besmirch the administration, had acted in collusion with some spy or emissary of a foreign
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