Then, through the support of our friends Mrs. Rose and
Wendell Phillips, who are ever ready in the cause of human
rights, I was allowed, in my native tongue, to echo faintly the
cry for justice and freedom. What a change has been wrought since
then! To-day they greet us with deferential respect. Such giant
steps are made by public opinion! What they then derided, and
sought, through physical power and rough ignorance, to render
wholly impossible, to day they greet with the voice of welcome
and jubilee. Such an expression of sentiment is to us the most
certain and joyful token of a gigantic revolution in public
opinion--still more gratifying is it, that the history of the
last few years proves that under the force of an universal
necessity, reason and freedom are being consistently developed.
Such is the iron step of time, that it brings forward every event
to meet its rare fulfillment. Under your protection I am once
more permitted, in this dawning of a new epoch which is visible
to all eyes that will see, and audible to all ears that will
hear, to express my hopes, my longing, my striving, and my
confidence. And now, permit me to do so in the language of my
childhood's play, as well as that of the earnest and free
philosophy of German thinkers and workers. Not that I believe it
is left to me to interest the children of my old Fatherland, here
present, in the new era of truth and freedom, as if these
glorious principles were not of yore implanted in their
hearts--as if they could not take them up in a strange idiom--but
because I am urged from my deepest soul to speak out loud and
free, as I have ever felt myself constrained to do, and as I can
not do in the language of my beloved adopted land. The
consciousness and the holy conviction of our inalienable human
rights, which I have won in the struggle of my own strangely
varied life, and in the wrestling for independence which has
carried me through the terrors of bloody revolution, and brought
me to this effulgent shore where _Sanita Libertas_ is free to all
who seek it--this sacred strand, of which our German poet says:
_Dich halte ich!_ (I have gained thee and will not leave thee.)
So I turn to you, my dear compatriots, in the language of our
Fatherland--to you who are accustomed to German wa