THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
women hardly able to speak when they nodded to one another a last farewell. At last the train started into motion, they gave three cheers for America, and then in the first gray dawn of the morning I saw them wending their way over the hill until they disappeared in the shadow of the forest. And I heard many a man say how happy he would be if he could go with them to that great and free country, where a man could be himself.”
I then described how, from these first crude and vague impressions, my ideal conception of the American republic as the hope and guide of liberty-loving mankind developed itself, how peoples struggling for liberty and hampered in that struggle by old inherited institutions and customs and habits of thinking were wistfully looking to this new world for the realization of that ideal; how this new world, by the evolutions of history, appeared predestined and wonderfully fitted for that realization; how, by the assembling and intermingling of the most vigorous elements of all civilized nations, a new and youthful nation was created; how that new nation asserted and maintained its rightful independent existence upon the principle that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; how this basic principle indicated the great, historic mission of the American republic, and how the best hopes of mankind were bound up in the fulfillment of this mission, for which we were responsible to the world. I continued thus:
“This principle contains the program of our political existence. It is the most progressive, for it takes even the lowliest members of the human family out of their degradation, and inspires them with the elevating consciousness of equal human dignity; the most conservative, for it makes a common
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