Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/123

Rh Lecompton Constitution. So he saved his Senatorship in Illinois, as the champion of free labor. But the South frowned, and immediately after his victory he went into slaveholding States and admitted in his speeches that slavery may go into the territories without a special act of territorial legislation. Believing the South satisfied, and seeing his chances in the North endangered, he wrote his Harper's Magazine essay, assuming that slavery can exist only by virtue of local law. The South frowning again, he endeavored to make his peace with the slaveholders by declaring that he would submit to the Charleston Convention, and instructing his nearest friends in the House to vote for the Administration candidate for the Speakership. So he endeavored to catch both sections of the Union successively in the trap of a double-faced sophistry. He tried to please them both in trying to cheat them both. But he placed himself between the logic of liberty on one, and logic of slavery on the other side. He put the sword of logic into the hands of his opponents, and tried to defend himself with the empty scabbard of ‘unfriendly legislation.’ Unfriendly legislation, which in one case would have been unnecessary, in the other unconstitutional—the invention of a mind without logic and of a heart without sympathies; recognized on all sides as a mere subterfuge, behind which the moral cowardice of a Presidential candidate entrenched itself.”

Such will be the verdict of future historians. They will indulge in curious speculations about the times when such doctrines could be passed off as sound statesmanship—a statesmanship indeed, the prototype of which may be found, not in Plutarch, but in Aristophanes—but they will be slow to believe that there were people dull enough to be deceived by it.

Leaving aside the stern repudiation which Mr. Douglas's