THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
a century after its first appearance, a new edition has been printed and widely read.
In that letter I described how the European revolutionary idealists, as I knew them in the old world, would at first be startled, if not shocked, by the aspect of a really free people,—a democracy in full operation on a large scale,—the most contradictory tendencies and antagonistic movements openly at work, side by side, or against one another, enlightenment and stupid bigotry, good citizenship and lawlessness, benevolent and open-handed public spirit and rapacious greed, democracy and slavery, independent spirit and subserviency to party despotism and to predominant public opinion—all this in bewildering confusion. The newly arrived European democrat, having lived in a world of theories and imaginings without having had any practical experience of a democracy at work, beholding it for the first time, ask himself: “Is this really a people living in freedom? Is this the realization of my ideal?” He is puzzled and perplexed, until it dawns upon him that, in a condition of real freedom, man manifests himself, not as he ought to be, but as he is, with all his bad as well as his good qualities, instincts, and impulses: with all his attributes of strength as well as all his weaknesses; that this, therefore, is not an ideal state, but simply a state in which the forces of good have a free field as against the forces of evil, and in which the victories of virtue, of enlightenment, and of progress are not achieved by some power or agency outside of the people, for their benefit, but by the people themselves.
Such victories of the forces of good may be slow in being accomplished, but they will be all the more thorough and durable in their effects, because they will be the product of the people's own thought and effort. The people may commit follies or mistakes ever so grievous, but having committed those
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