LXVIII
Recollections of Carl Schurz
This mention of Mr. Schurz reminds me of some other occasions on which I had intercourse with him. He and I many times served together on committees that had to do with matters of public interest. We were members of the same clubs, and we saw much of each other at private dinners and in other social ways, so that I came to know him well and to appreciate at its full value that absolute honesty of mind which I regard as his distinguishing characteristic. Without that quality of sincerity, and with a conscience less exigent and less resolute than his, Carl Schurz's political career might have compassed any end that ambition set before him. That is perhaps a reflection on public life and the men engaged in it. If so, I cannot help it. As it was, he never hesitated for a moment to "quarrel with his bread and butter" if his antagonism to wrong, and especially to everything that militated against human liberty, called for such quarreling. He was above all things a patriot in whose estimation considerations of the public welfare outweighed, overrode, and trampled to earth all other considerations of what kind soever. Party was to him no more than an implement, a tool for the accomplishment of patriotic ends, and he gave to party no allegiance whatever beyond the point at which it ceased to serve such ends. He was always ready to quarrel with his own party and quit it for cause, even when it offered him high preferment as the reward of continued allegiance.
In the same way, he held the scales true in all his judgments of men. Mr. Lincoln once wrote him a letter—often quoted by his enemies—which any "statesman" of the accepted type would have regarded as an unforgivable affront. Yet in due time Mr. Schurz wrote an appreciative estimate of Lincoln which has no fit fellow in the whole body of Lincoln literature. His judgments of men and measures were always the honest conclusions of an honest mind that held in reverence no other creed than that of truth and preached no other gospel than that of human liberty.
One evening I sat with him at a little dinner given by Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the historian. Paul Leicester Ford sat between him and me, while on my right sat our hostess and some other gentlewomen. Our hostess presently asked me what I thought of a certain distinguished personage whose name was at that time in everybody's mouth, and whose popularity—chiefly won by genial, humorous, after-dinner speaking—was wholly unmatched throughout the country. I do not mention his name, because he still lives and is under a cloud.
I answered that I thought him one of the worst and most dangerous of popular public men, adding:
"He has done more than any other man living to corrupt legislatures and pervert legislation to the service of iniquitous corporations."
Mr. Schurz, who was talking to some one at the other end of the table, caught some hint of what I had said. He instantly turned upon me with a demand that I should repeat it. I supposed that a controversy was coming, and by way of challenging the worst, I repeated what I had said, with added emphasis. Mr. Schurz replied:
"You are right so far as your criticism goes. The man has done all that you charge in the way of corrupting legislatures and perverting legislation. He has made a business of it. But that is the very smallest part of his offense against morality, good government, and free institutions. His far greater sin is that he has made corruption respectable, in the eyes of the people. And those who invite him to banquets and set him to speak there, and noisily applaud him, are all of them partners in his criminality whether they know it or not."
Mr. Schurz's Patriotism
One other conversation with Mr. Schurz strongly impressed me with his exalted character and the memory of it lingers in my mind. In the summer of the year 1900, when Mr. Bryan was nominated for the second time for President, on a platform strongly reaffirming his free silver policy and everything else for which he had stood in 1896, it was given out that Carl Schurz, who had bitterly and effectively opposed him in 1896, intended now to support him. I had finally withdrawn from the World's service, and from newspaper work of every kind, and was passing the summer in literary work at my cottage on Lake George. But the World telegraphed me asking me to see Mr. Schurz, who was also a Lake George cottager, and get from him some statement of his reasons for now supporting the man and the policies that he had so strenuously opposed four years before.
I had no idea that Mr. Schurz would give me any such statement for publication, but he and I had long been friends, and a call upon him would occupy a morning agreeably, with the remote chance that I might incidentally render a service to my friends of the World staff. Therefore, I went.
Mr. Schurz told me frankly that he could give me nothing for publication, just as I had expected that he would do.
"I am going to make one or two speeches in this campaign," he said, "and anything I might give you now would simply take the marrow out of my speeches. But personally I shall be glad to talk the matter over with you. It seems to me to be one of positively vital importance—not to parties, for now that I have come to the end of an active life I care nothing for parties—but to our country and to the cause of human liberty."
"You think human liberty is involved?" I asked.
"Yes, certainly. Those conceptions upon which human liberty rests in every country in the world had their birth in the colonies out of which this nation was formed and they were first effectively formulated in the Declaration of Independence and enacted into fundamental law in our Constitution. The spectacle of a great, free, rich, and powerful nation securely built upon those ideas as its foundation has been an inspiration to all other peoples, and better still, a compulsion upon all rulers. If that inspiration is lost, and that compulsion withdrawn, the brutal military force that buttresses thrones will quickly undo all that our influence has accomplished in teaching men their rights and warning monarchs of their limitations."
In answer to further questions he went on to say:
"The spirit of imperialism—which is the arch-enemy of human liberty—is rampant in the land, and it seems to me the supreme duty of every man who loves liberty to oppose it with all his might, at whatever sacrifice of lesser things he may find to be necessary. I am as antagonistic to Mr. Bryan's free silver policy and to some other policies of his as I was four years ago. But the time has come when men on the other side jeer at the Declaration of Independence and mock at the Constitution itself. There is danger in this—a danger immeasurably greater than any that financial folly threatens. It seems to me time for a revolution—not a revolution of violence or one which seeks overthrow, but a revolution of public opinion designed to restore the landmarks and bring the country back to its foundations of principle. Financial folly, such as Mr. Bryan advocates, threatens us with nothing worse than a temporary disturbance of business affairs. Imperialism threatens us with the final destruction of those ideas and principles that have made our country great in itself and immeasurably greater in its influence upon thought and upon the welfare of humanity in every country on earth."
I have recorded Mr. Schurz's words here, as nearly as a trained memory allows me to do, not with the smallest concern for the political issues of nine years ago, but solely because his utterances on that occasion seem to me to have shown forth, as nothing else could have done, the high inspiration of his patriotism, and to explain what many have regarded as the inconsistencies of his political attitude at various periods of his life. That so-called inconsistency was in fact a higher consistency. His allegiance was at all times given to principles, to ideas, to high considerations of right and of human liberty, and in behalf of these he never hesitated to sacrifice his political prospects, his personal advantage, or anything else that he held to be of less human consequence.