THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
animated him. It appeared rather to be the surly pretension of a naturally stupid person to be something better than other people, and the insistence that they must bow to his assumed aristocracy and all its claims. When I heard Senator Mason speak, I felt that if I were a member of the Senate, his supercilious attitude and his pompous utterances of dull commonplace, sometimes very offensive by their overbearing tone, would have been particularly exasperating to me.
After the Senate, on the morning of the 4th of March, 1854, had passed the Kansas-Nebraska bill, I returned from Washington to Philadelphia. I took with me some very powerful impressions. I had seen the slave power officially represented by some of its foremost champions—overbearing, defiant, dictatorial, vehemently demanding a chance for unlimited expansion, and, to secure its own existence, threatening the most vital principle of free institutions, the right of free inquiry and of free utterance—aye, threatening the Union, the National Republic itself. I had seen in alliance with the slave power, not only far-reaching material interests and a sincere but easily intimidated conservatism, but a selfish party spirit and an artful and unscrupulous demagogy making a tremendous effort to obfuscate the moral sense of the North. I had seen standing against this tremendous array of forces a small band of anti-slavery men faithfully fighting the battle of freedom and civilization. I saw the decisive contest rapidly approaching, and I felt an irresistible impulse to prepare myself for usefulness, however modest, in the impending crisis; and to that end I pursued with increased assiduity my studies of the political history and the social conditions of the Republic, and of the theory and practical workings of its institutions. To the same end I thought it necessary to see more of the country
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