resenting every phase and form of the best Massachusetts life.
And why have these men asked Carl Schurz to meet us here? Because they consider him to stand prominent among the statesmen of this country for that which they most esteem and honor,—for purity in politics; for the best republican principles; for human progress; for the union of liberty and law; for honest, clean administration. The men who signed that invitation have not done it hastily or ignorantly. They have known you long, Sir. They are familiar with your course. They remember your struggles and sufferings in the cause of liberty abroad. They saw you an exile, on foreign shores, coming among a people of another race and language, mastering the resources of that language as few to whom it is native have done, and becoming a power for liberty here as there. You have guided the vast body of German voters in our land, and united them against slavery. You represent to our minds the best elements of both nations. We owe it greatly to your efforts that we obtained the last four years of a good administration, and we are largely indebted to you for whatever it has done in the cause of civil service reform and pure administration. The government of President Hayes has seemed a folly and a failure to the trading Republican politician on whose brazen forehead is written the motto, “To the victors belong the spoils.” But we see in it four years of successful progress in the
