THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
men who remembered the same old Fatherland that I remembered as the cradle of us all, and who had come from afar to find new homes for themselves and their children in this new land of freedom and betterment—to meet them, I say, face to face, without the noise and formality of a large assemblage, and to talk to them in a conversational, familiar way, without any attempt at oratorical flourish, about the pending questions to be decided and the duties we owed under existing circumstances to the great Republic that had received us so hospitably, and about the high value of the blessings we enjoyed and had to preserve, and how we could do no greater honor to our old Fatherland than by being conscientious and faithful citizens of the new. There they sat for an hour or two, hard-working farmers, and small tradesmen, and laborers, with earnest and thoughtful faces, some of quick perception and others of more slowly working minds, listening with strained attention, sometimes with a puzzled expression, which made me go over the same ground again and again, in clearer language and with different illustrations; they sat, often without a sign of applause except now and then a nod or a mere look of intelligent agreement—until the close of the speech, when they would throng around me for a hand-shake, and not seldom with requests for a little more elucidation of this or that point, which they thought of using in discussing the matter with their neighbors. It would happen that some German-born Democratic politician, a local office-holder perhaps, a country postmaster, or deputy sheriff, or clerk of a board of supervisors, or of a court, fearing for his revenue or his political influence, attempted to disturb such meetings by noisy conduct or by asking impertinent questions or by loudly calling upon his friends to go away. But I cannot remember one instance in which the effect of such an attempt did not turn against the intruder.
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