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Excerpt from The Nomination of Abraham Lincoln; New Forces and New Men: An Address Delivered at the Chicago Historical Society on May 18, 1960
Northwest, this power was founded not only upon swelling numbers and wealth, but upon the existence there of the most oaken type of American democracy. Later generations may well look back nostalgically upon the Plutarchan virtue of democracy in that day, for some of it has been lost. We find it well described in the letters of Carl Schurz, one of the dele gates most loudly cheered in the convention. This refugee from German tyranny had arrived in the Northwest in a mood to exalt the advantages of the new land, and it had surpassed his expectations. His first introduction to Chicago in 1854 had not been altogether happy. Finding it impossible to get a hotel room to himself, he had wandered the wooden sidewalks late at night in company with millions of lively rats. Rats of all sizes and colors, old and young, white and gray, he wrote his wife, played charmingly about my feet. And when I stepped on one and it squealed, it seemed to me as if I ought to beg pardon. Yet on the whole, the lake city impressed him might ily. Twenty-two years earlier the site had been occupied only by a few miserable huts; now the pace of construction and business activity was indescribable. Yet what impressed him much more than the growth, here and all over the region, was the quality of the men and women; the intelligence and ideal ism compounded in their democracy.
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