Schurz was first of all and above all an orator. His achievements on the platform and in the Senate were undeniable. He was unsurpassed in debate. He had no need to exploit himself. The single chapter in his life on which light was desirable was the military episode. The cruel and false saying, “I fight mit Sigel und runs mit Schurz,” obviously the offspring of malignity, did mislead many people, reënforced by the knowledge that Schurz was not an educated soldier. How thoroughly he disposes of this calumny his memoirs attest. Fuller, more convincing vindication could not be asked of any man; albeit by those familiar with the man himself it could not be doubted that he had both courage and aptitude for military employment. II A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the vortex of affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might have lived and died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had pursued his musical studies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano keyboard. As it was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The rescue of Kinkel, the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and London awakened within him the spirit of action rather than of adventure. There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and too accomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which he never departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and aims he was a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in temperament and disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself. He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country and take on so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the anti-slavery movement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea carried him quickly from one distinction to another; the ebb tide, which found him in the Senate of the United States, revealed to his startled senses the creeping, crawling things beneath the surface; partyism rampant, tyrannous and corrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White House; a Blaine, a Butler and a Garfield leading the Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkling leading the Senate; single-minded disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction, nowhere. Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An impossible scheme of reconstruction was trailing its slow, putrescent length along. The revenue service was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress were packed with mercenaries. Money-making in high places had become the order of the day. Was it for this that oceans of patriotism, of treasure and of blood had been poured out? Was it for this that he had fought with tongue and pen and sword?