Mr. Schurz has good reason to be grateful to Senator Mat. Carpenter of Wisconsin - grateful for a piece of impudent boorishness, that has given him a chance to show that he is a good and true American. Since Schurz split with the Republican Party in Missouri in August, 1870, we have fought his policies, because we regard them as wrong and destructive. However, one can have sharply divergent opinions without casting groundless aspersions on another's character. If a Republican senator, like Carpenter, goes to the length of reproaching him for his German birth - and accuses the Senator from Missouri of regarding himself in his innermost heart as still a subject of Emperor William - then he is committing an infamy against which every decent person must protest most energetically.

If Lasker was to be silenced in the German Reichstag by an opponent with the cry of "Hep, hep!" every educated person in Germany would regard that as an infamy, and Lasker would lose, not gain by it. Carpenter, however, has talked to Schurz in a manner which was only the parlamentary equivalent of the "damned Dutch" of American ragamuffins; that is to say, of the American counterpart of the German, "Hep, hep." As far as an infamy can insult anybody, this one insults all German-Americans --- most of them in a much higher degree than Schurz.

Because of all prominent German-Americans, Schurz is the one who has most carefully and successfully rid himself of all German views, habits, and characteristics. When the Chicago Tribune says in his praise, "there is not a more thoroughly Americanized German," then the Tribune, as far as its meaning goes, speaks the literal truth.

The Tribune, of course, means by "Americanized" only Anglo-Americanized. It reminds its readers that Schurz declared himself last summer with firm determination against any organization based solely on German nationality or German desires, and that he thereby stepped on the corns of "local oracles" of the Germans. This was all the more noteworthy, as the highest among the "local oracles" who wanted to create a special German party was Schurz's own brother-in-law, Mr. Edmund Jussen. It was Mr. Jussen who triumphed in a Turn-Hall meeting over the editor of the Illinois Staats Zeitung, who was protesting the idiocy of a new German party. If in spite of this effort the party was not created, it may in part be due to the fact that Mr. Schurz in his speech embraced the point of view of the Illinois Staats Zeitung and turned his back on the German party planned by his brother-in-law. No - the reproach of feeling too strongly German, Mr. Schurz has certainly not deserved. Even the 4designation German-American fits him only in a very restricted sense; namely, in respect to the fact that he was born in Germany, and that he speaks and writes German (with an extraordinarily large admixture of English and Latin words). But in the sense in which Hecker, Stallo, Danzer, Lexow, Bernays et al. use the word German-American, it does not fit Schurz. They understand by that word a man who is determined to contribute to the still unfinished character of the American people the good and vigorous qualities of the German national type. Such a man rests his whole heart on the country that he has freely chosen as his elective home.....and is willing to sacrifice as an American blood and property if the rights and the honor of the country demand it.

But with this, faithfulness to German ways and customs, and the desire to prepare with legal means for these ways and customs a place in America is is entirely consistent. If, in this direction, Mr. Schurz has ever been publicly active - if he ever has opposed with the unequivocal decisiveness of a Hecker, a Stallo or a Hassaurek, prohibitory temperance or blue laws, 5or has insisted on the introduction of German instruction in the schools, if he ever has; we, at least, have not heard of it.