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 If that inspiration is lost, and that compulsion withdrawn, the brutal military force that buttresses thrones will quickly undo all that our influence has accomplished in teaching men their rights and warning monarchs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.
LXIX
The End of Newspaper Life