THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
torch-bearer of civilization, and that this great destiny can be fulfilled only by waging a relentless war against all dishonest practices or ignoble aspirations in our home politics, that may impair the blessings and injure the prestige of democratic government, and by conducting our intercourse with foreign nations on the highest principles of fairness and good will. I have, no doubt, committed many, and some serious mistakes in my public life, but now, at the close, I may say for myself that throughout it I have conscientiously observed that rule.
In the campaign of 1860 I made two speeches, which, to judge from their publication in newspapers and from the number of pamphlet copies circulated, attracted much attention. The one was delivered at St. Louis, Missouri. Although Missouri was a Slave State, the anti-slavery element in the City of St. Louis, composed in great part of the German-born population, with some energetic native Americans among its leaders, had acquired such strength that it was hoped it would serve as the nucleus for an effective emancipation movement in the State. I was invited to address a mass-meeting in support of it, and I accepted the invitation all the more eagerly as I might hope to have among my hearers some representatives of the slave-holding interest and to speak to them, face to face. This hope was gratified. The meeting was very large, and, as my friends informed me, not a few of the principal slave-holders and pro-slavery men came to listen. The speech I made to them was, I think, the best of my anti-slavery speeches. I undertook to show the Southern people the utter incompatibility of the needs and the aspirations of slavery with the essential attributes of democratic institutions of government, as well as with the natural requirements and aspirations of free-labor society, and thus to demonstrate to them the absolute downfall of slavery in the near future, whatever the Southern peo-
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