THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
into journalistic work. He learned to speak and write English, and continued to speak and write German, commanding both languages, as I thought, equally well. His general ability and the faculty of quick perception made him a keen observer, and admirably fitted him for his work. He wrote a book on the United States full of that youthfully enthusiastic praise of American institutions which, at that period, was still sounded in perfect good faith by a large majority of the American people, to be re-echoed throughout the world—that exuberant optimistic fatalism which was quite sure that, in this republic, the future would right all wrongs, however threatening such wrongs might appear at present. At the same time, owing to his German education and to his continued intelligent interest in European conditions and affairs, he judged things American from a point of view not, indeed, less sympathetic, but a little different from that of the average American—a little more critical, perhaps—and he found that his reasoning and his conclusions were not always acceptable to his American friends. He therefore had ceased to express them as freely as he would have liked to do; and when I had become acquainted with him, he soon seemed to conceive a great liking for me, perhaps mainly for the reason that he expected the young immigrant recently arrived from Europe readily to understand him when he unbosomed himself.
He confided to me that while the distribution of the offices as public plunder among the members of the victorious party had become a firmly settled system, and it was entirely useless to talk against it, he himself had come to consider it an abuse fraught with very serious danger to our free institutions. He had been personally, and, as he said, even familiarly acquainted with the great political stars of the period just past: Clay,
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