new party. But what a rotten political machinery we have, which makes it possible for two such men as Cleveland and Reid [Thomas B. Reed?] to be now sulking in their tents! Bless you, Carl Schurz!

Your admiring fellow-citizen.

Confidential.

TO ERVING WINSLOW

16 EAST 64th St., New York, March 28, 1900.

It seems we are looking at the third-ticket question from different points of view.

A third ticket composed of Republicans would in the campaign of 1900 help to defeat McKinley in the same way in which the Palmer ticket helped to defeat Bryan in 1896.

The Palmer ticket enlisted in the campaign of 1896 a great many Democrats and Mugwumps who would not support McKinley directly. It made it easy for many persons to render active service in the campaign who would otherwise not have done so. A considerable number of such persons started out with the intention of voting for Palmer, but at the last moment concluded that it would be more effective to vote for McKinley directly; and they did so after having served in the campaign under the auspices of Palmer. This accounts for the small number of votes Palmer received.

According to this experience I see good reason for believing that a third ticket composed of old Republicans would, in the coming campaign, not strengthen McKinley, but weaken him, for the agitation conducted under its auspices would be conducted directly against the policy represented by him. It would make it easier for many persons of influence who dislike the Democratic candidate as much as the original Palmer men disliked McKinley,

to take an active and useful part in the anti-imperialist crusade. It would also open to the anti-imperialist speakers a great many ears which otherwise would be closed to them. I am, therefore, inclined to think that the nomination of such a ticket would tell, on the whole, heavily against McKinley, as the nomination of the Palmer ticket told heavily against Bryan in 1896.

As to the influence likely to be exercised upon the new President by anti-imperialists not belonging to his party, I doubt whether the nomination of a third ticket would under such circumstances make any difference.

DR. ABRAM JACOBI1

About a year ago I passed through an ordeal very like that which my friend, Dr. Jacobi, is enjoying now. I know, therefore, from personal experience what it implies. To find one's self congratulated upon having arrived at an age, which, according to correct notions, marks the terminus of human vitality; to have it complimentarily announced that one is now classed among the ancients, whose right to claim a place on the stage of the present active generation may be considered open to question; to feel one's self still pretty young and capable of activity as well as enjoyment, as I am sure Dr. Jacobi and I do,— and then to remember that you younger men may smile at us for indulging in such an amiable illusion, while you comfort us with the patronizing remark that we are remarkably well preserved-all this is an entertainment of not altogether unmixed hilarity. And then, also, to be pelted with merciless exposure of all one's virtues and accomplishments and endeavors and achievements

I

• Response to the toast, "The Citizen," at a complimentary dinner at Delmonico's, New York City, May 5, 1900, tendered to Dr. Jacobi on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of his birth.

compliments which modesty shrinks from accepting and which politeness to kind friends forbids to decline-well, one appreciates it very highly and with sincere gratitude, to be sure, but it is an experience, to say the least, of complex sensations.

I therefore offer to my friend Jacobi the sincere and profound sympathy of one who knows. I well understand that troubled gaze of his which he fixes abstractedly upon the table-cloth before him or upon the chandeliers above him, while the floods of eulogy are beating relentlessly upon his devoted head. I understand the peculiar dread with which, no doubt, he has seen me get upon my feetme, a person that has been acquainted with him for fully fifty years—and who, as he is well aware, knows more about him than any one else here present. Still, in one respect he need have no fear. I shall not reveal about him any obnoxious secrets. Do not understand me as meaning that I could if I would. No, I would not if I could, being mindful of the proprieties of the occasion. I am going to tell the simple truth; and that he will have to bear as a brave man with becoming fortitude.

Yes, of Dr. Jacobi's friends assembled here, I am, no doubt, the oldest, probably the oldest in years, and certainly the oldest in friendship-for that friendship can look back upon just a half century of uninterrupted, and, I may add, unclouded duration. It was in the year 1850, in the German University town of Bonn-on-the-Rhine, that we first met. He was then still a student of medicine in regular standing. I was already an exile, but had secretly come back to Germany, engaged in a somewhat adventurous enterprise connected with the revolutionary movements of that period-an enterprise which made it necessary to conceal my whereabouts from those in power, with whom my relations were at the time, to speak within bounds, somewhat strained. I had the best reasons for

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desiring to avoid persons whose ill-will or indiscretion might have brought me into touch with the constituted authorities. It was then that a "mutual friend" introduced Jacobi and me to each other during a dark night in an out-of-the-way little garden house, having described him to me as a young man who could be absolutely depended upon in every respect and under all circumstances. And as the man who can be depended upon in every respect and under all circumstances, I have known and loved him ever since; and if we could live together another half century, I should be ready to vouch for him in that sense every day of the year and every hour of the day.

At the period of which I have been speaking our intercourse was very short. We travelled together a day or so -he going to Schleswig-Holstein where, as a budding physician, he expected to do service in the capacity of a volunteer surgeon in the war then going on, and I to the field of my operations. Several years later we met again in the city of New York. He had in the meantime suffered in our native country long imprisonment for his active and self-sacrificing desire to make the people free and happy; and then he sought and found a new home in this great Republic in which, if the people do not create or maintain conditions to make them free and happy, it is their own fault.

I have been asked to speak of Dr. Jacobi as a citizen, and I may say that the manner in which he got into jail in the old country-for I have to admit the fact that he did serve two years in state prisons, whatever you may at the first blush think of it-indicated at that early day very clearly what kind of a citizen he would make in this Republic. He was one of the young men of that period who had conceived certain ideals of right, justice, honor, liberty, popular government-but which they cherished and believed in with the fullest sincerity, and for which they

were ready to work and to suffer, and, if necessary, to die. Theirs was a devotion, too, wholly free from self-seeking ambition-a devotion which found all its aims and aspirations and rewards within itself.

Of that class of young men he was one, struggling with poverty and no end of other discouragements in his laborious effort to become a good physician. He knew well that political activity could not possibly help him in reaching that end, but might rather become a serious obstacle in his path. Neither had he any craving to see his name in the newspapers, or to strike an attitude before the public. But moved by a simple sense of duty to his fellow-men, he associated himself, and unostentatiously coöperated with others in advocating and propagating the principles which formed his political creed. His convictions might have been honestly modified or changed by super-study, or larger experience, but they would not yield an inch to the reductions of fortunes, or to the frowns or favors of power. And as nothing could prevail upon him to renounce or even equivocate about the faith he honestly held, he went to jail for it, suffering his martyrdom with that inflexible and, at the same time, modest fortitude which is the touchstone of true manhood. Thus to have served a term in prison was with him a mark of fidelity to his conception of his duty as a citizen.

And that has been the type of his citizenship ever since. To be sure, the danger of being clapped into jail for the assertion or propagation of one's opinions is not very great in this Republic-at least, not yet. But we often hear it said—and, I fear, not without reason—that in our democracy as well as in others, public opinion-a term which is not seldom used to dignify a widespread prejudice, or an unreasoning craze—exercises a tyrannical sway, and that there are many people whose dread of becoming unpopular, or of incurring the displeasure of the influential elements of