IT 
I GO WEST 
We must now go back to the time when I first bade 
farewell to my good Pennsylvania friends in order 
to ““go West and grow up with the country.” The 
nineteen years between that parting scene and my 
first election to "Congress is, from a mere human 
viewpoint, probably the most eventful period of my 
life. Into it’are crowded the official transformation 
of ‘a German subject .into a full-fledged American 
citizen; a visit to the Fatherland; earnest law 
studies there under the tutelage of a renowned 
jurist; the introduction, after my return from Eu- 
rope, to the mysteries of American journalism and 
polities; the happy Wiioh in matrimony with the 
danghter of an old Missouri German, prominent in 
the state’s history; the service, extending over sev- 
eral years, as a legislative correspondent in the 
capital of the state of New York and later as foreign 
editor of the N.Y. Staats-Zeitung; the return to 
St. Louis to assume editorial charge of the daily 
Tribusié, the election to thé St. Liouis Board of Edu- 
cation and to the presidency of that body, an honor- 
ary office which in fifrié proved the stepping stone to 
the higher honors in the councils of the nation. 
On a cold winter day of the year 1874 I arrived in 
St. Louis, to rejoin my old friend Hildebrand, who 
had secured work on one of the German papers. 
Here, for the second time since I had forsworn the 
‘black art,”” I was obliged to take stick in hand, 
working first on the Courier and afterwards on the 
diizeiger. 
" Soon after my arrival at St. Louis I had the good 
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