ADDRESS OF THE
HONORABLE JOSEPH H. CHOATE
THIS great and brilliant company has assembled for no funereal rites, for no obituary service. We are here to do honor to the memory of a great citizen, to exult in his exalted virtues, and to learn the lesson of patriotism from his long and honorable life. A noble friend of mine, dying, said that his life seemed like the flight of a bird through a church from window to window, and at best it is
“Short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun.”
And our sketches of Carl Schurz to-night must be short indeed if we would do justice to this splendid program, and enjoy the music which he loved so much better than words, however weighty.
I heard Mr. Lincoln at the Cooper Institute in 1860 say: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it.” Search all the books in all our libraries, and you can find no better statement of Mr. Schurz's rule of life than this. Truth, right, duty, freedom were the four corners of his chart of life, with which all his speech and conduct squared. And so it was from the beginning to the end. In the first freshness of youth he left the university and joined the Revolution of 1848, and fought to break oppression and maintain constitutional liberty. In that marvelous achievement of daring and devotion by which at the deadly peril of his own life he rescued his old teacher and comrade from the fortress in which he had been condemned for life to pick oakum for the Prussian Government, he furnished to the world a heroic romance, worthy to be immortalized by a new Schiller, a miracle long since celebrated, and always to be celebrated in German poetry and song. A refugee from hopeless tyranny, he came here into exile and made America his home. He was himself
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