Senator Summer's motion has given rise to a very sharp debate in which Mr. Schurz for the first time has made his voice heard on the issue. Mr. Schurz said that a year and more ago numerous demands had come to him from German-born citizens to make a complaint, but that he then did not want to do so...because(listen and wonder!) he feared the administration would feel impelled to defend its actions and there by the existing good understanding between it and the German element might be disturbed. Noble-minded, big - hearted man! While he was already since the fall elections of 1870 occupied with the founding of a new coalition party, he swallowed his anger about the arms deliveries to France only- in order not to cause enmity between the German element and Mr. Grant... He has already then decided to fight Grant, but he wanted to defeat him by pure valor, not by turning the Germans against him! We will openly confess that such magnanimity would not have occurred to us as an explanation of the uprising silence of Mr. Schurz. Now we also understand why his brother-in-law, the Federal tax collector in Chicago, so carefully absented himself from the German meeting where the indignation against the arms traffic found expression... He, too, passed the chance to turn the German element away from the administration.

A few months later things were different.

What regarding Mr. Charles Sumner?...It was his duty as chairman of the Committee for Foreign Affairs to protest against the arms traffic... Instead he travelled around in the country reciting a bombastic panegyric on the French republic...and did everything he could to bring public opinion into such a state that the sending of arms to France had to appear as a most meritorious and praiseworthy underprise... Now suddenly he feels himself impelled to be more German than Bismarck himself and where Bismarck did not sue, to sue himself...Now suddenly he shoots his mouth off in order to tell the English: "Don't be so stupid as to give in on the Alabama question! Why, the U. S. has sinned just as much as you!"

That is what the Volksfreund in spite of all its bitter enmity to President Grant calls "unpatriotic." And he who has a milder word for it, may say so.