SPEECH OF THE HONORABLE CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, CHAIRMAN.
Gentlemen: We in America—in that respect not
very different, I suppose, from other progressive nations—have
always with us some burning issue—the question
of the day, and as such so absorbing in interest as to
throw all other questions out of the field of discussion;
for the time being it is, or seems, all-important. Of
several questions of this sort we will hear more or less
to-night; as also of Mr. Schurz's connection with them.
Even if the programme in your hands did not name
them, these issues would at once suggest themselves.
There was the Slavery debate, which filled men's minds
and kept busy their tongues, through twenty years;
then came the Civil War; then Reconstruction; then
Fiat Money; then Civil Service Reform; then Bimetalism;
and now, at last, what some call “Imperialism,”
and others know only as “Expansion.” In the discussion
of each of these issues Mr. Schurz has been prominent,
and I should be at a loss to decide which I thought
he had discussed most effectively; and yet it is not with
any one of these issues, or with all of them together,
that he, this evening, is most closely associated in my
mind. His closest association, as I now think of him, is
with another American political problem—a problem I
