“ Not even his high soul and youthful ardor, fired as he was by the courage to dare everything, could make headway either in disturbing the dull content of the mass of his countrymen or in getting a sense of the rights of man into the dense heads of his country's rulers. In Prussia, he would have beat out his brains against the immense, immovable weight of autocracy, just as Matthew Arnold said Byron would have beat his out against the beetling cliffs of British Philistinism — and the world would have been no better for it. ”

“ Heine spoke of himself as a “soldier in the war of liberation,” but that was the liberation of the mind, the enfranchisement of thought and utterance. Mr. Schurz contended for the liberty to live, to have, and to enjoy, for civil freedom under equal laws. He had, too, the courage to fight for the beliefs that were in him. But for the accident of having been born before destiny had struck the hour for a successful war of liberation in Prussia, it can hardly be doubted that his life would have been passed in struggles and triumphs and constructive statesmanship in his native land. ”

“ Nothing but compelling force can let the light of heaven in upon a mind set in that mold and wandering in that dense darkness. Moreover, the hot fever of unrest that burned in the bosom of Schurz and the other revolutionists left the Prussian mass cold and unmoved. Finally, when Louis Napoleon had played to its end the game of republican Government with which he had tricked the French people, the pall of reaction settled down over Europe again, and the fires of revolution were everywhere quenched. Then young Schurz came to America. ”