For example, as we are authorized by the Constitution and compelled by necessity to build and maintain light-houses on our coast and establish fog-signals, we are bound to make all necessary scientific inquiries in reference to light and its laws, sound and its laws—to do whatever in the way of science is necessary to achieve the best results in lighting our coasts and warning our mariners of danger. So, when we are building iron-clads for our navy or casting guns for our army, we ought to know all that is scientifically possible to be known about the strength of materials and the laws of mechanics which apply to such structures. In short, wherever in exercising any of the necessary functions of the Government scientific inquiry is needed, let us make it, to the fullest extent, and at the public expense.
There is another exception to the general rule of leaving science to the voluntary action of the people. Wherever any great popular interest, affecting whole classes, possibly all classes of the community, imperatively need scientific investigation, and private enterprise cannot accomplish it, we may wisely intervene and help where the Constitution gives us authority. For example, in discovering the origin of yellow-fever and the methods of preventing its ravages, the nation should do, for the good of all, what neither the States nor individuals can accomplish. I might perhaps include in a third exception those inquiries which, in consequence of their great magnitude and cost, cannot be successfully made by private individuals. Outside these three classes of inquiries, the Government ought to keep its hands off, and leave scientific experiment and inquiry to the free competition of those bright, intelligent men whose genius leads them into the fields of research.
And I suspect, when we read the report of our commissioner to the late Paris Exposition, which shows such astonishing results, so creditable to our country, so honorable to the genius of our people, it will be found, in any final analysis of causes, that the superiority of Americans in that great Exposition resulted mainly from their superior freedom, and the greater competition between mind and mind untrammelled by Government interference; I believe it will be found we are best serving the cause of religion and science, and all those great primary rights which we did not delegate to the Congress or the States, but left the people free to enjoy and maintain them.
[Speech on the National Election.]
The great danger which threatens this country is, that our sovereign may be dethroned or destroyed by corruption. In any monarchy of the world, if the sovereign be slain or become lunatic, it is easy to put another in his place, for the sovereign is a person. But our sovereign is the whole body of voters. If you kill, or corrupt, or render lunatic our sovereign, there is no successor, no regent to take his place. The source of our sovereign's supreme danger, the point where his life is vulnerable, is at the ballot-box, where his will is declared; and if we cannot stand by that cradle of our sovereign's heir-apparent and protect it to the uttermost against all assassins and assailants, we have no government and no safety for the future.
[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.