[Remarks, in the House of Representatives, February 11, 1879, on the Life and Character of Gustave Schleicher.]
We are accustomed to say, and we have heard to-night, that he [Gustave Schleicher] was born on foreign soil. In one sense that is true; and yet in a very proper historic sense he was born in our fatherland. One of the ablest of recent historians begins his opening volume with the declaration that England is not the fatherland of the English-speaking people, but the ancient home, the real fatherland of our race, is the ancient forests of Germany. The same thought was suggested by Montesquieu long ago, when he declared in his Spirit of Laws that the British constitution came out of the woods of Germany.
To this day the Teutonic races maintain the same noble traits that Tacitus describes in his admirable history of the manners and character of the Germans. We may therefore say that the friend whose memory we honor to-night is one of the elder brethren of our race. He came to America direct from our fatherland, and not, like our own fathers, by the way of England.
We who were born and have passed all our lives in this wide New World can hardly appreciate the influences that surrounded his early life. Born on the borders of that great forest of Germany, the Odenwald, filled as it is with the memories and traditions of centuries, in which are mingled Scandinavian mythology, legends of the middle ages, romances of feudalism and chivalry, histories of barons and kings, and the struggles of a brave people for a better civilization; reared under the institutions of a strong, semi-despotic government; devoting his early life to personal culture, entering at an early age the University of Giessen, venerable with its two and a half centuries of existence, with a library of four hundred thousand volumes at his hand, with a great museum of the curiosities and mysteries of nature to study, he fed his eager spirit upon the rich culture which that Old World could give him, and at twenty-four years of age, in company with a band of thirty-seven young students, like himself, cultivated, earnest, liberty-loving almost to the verge of communism—and who of us would not be communists in a despotism?—he came to this country, attracted by one of the most wild and romantic pictures of American history, the picture of Texas as it existed near forty years ago; the country discovered by La Salle at the end of his long and perilous voyage from Quebec to the northern lakes and from the lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; the country possessed alternately by the Spanish and the French and then by Mexico; the country made memorable by such names as Blair, Houston, Albert Sidney Johnson, and Mirabeau Lamar, perhaps as adventurous and daring spirits as ever assembled on any spot of the earth; a country that achieved its freedom by heroism never surpassed, and which maintained its perilous independence for ten years in spite of border enemies and European intrigues.
It is said that a society was formed in Europe embracing in its membership men of high rank, even members of royal families, for the purpose of colonizing the new Republic of the Lone Star, and making it a dependency of Europe under their patronage; but without sharing in their designs, some twenty thousand Germans found their way to the new Republic, and among these young Schleicher came.