I do not know out the whole nation has lately inclined to that way of thinking, since it has selected for the highest offices men, not so much known to be thorough-going partisans, as thoroughly pure men of honesty and principle. When I make use of the word countrymen, I mean to do it in more senses than one; for first, of course, Mr. Schurz is by birth the countryman of us Germans, and we are proud of him; but, what is of more importance, he is, secondly, our countryman here and now as a naturalized citizen. In fact, he is the countryman of every man in this hall; for if naturalization does not make a countryman of any man in the country in which he lives, it means nothing. What the rights and the duties of a naturalized citizen are no one has better taught us by words and example than our honored guest; and it is only natural that the man who has laid down the principles of justice which enable the newly-arrived European immigrant to have his rights preserved, both in the country of his adoption and that of his birth, so that in due time he will, according to his intrinsic value, find, as it were, his specific gravity in the social scale,—that man, I say, will treat with the same humanity and justice the aborigines, and will allow them, according to their merits and capacity, to contribute their share to the development of the new history of mankind on this side of the Atlantic.
Let me take this occasion to assure Mr. Schurz that here, in the little German community of Bos-
