Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/140

106 whose ideas and conceptions are not founded upon profound moral convictions of right and wrong. What, then, shall we say of him who boastingly parades his indifference as a virtue? May we not drop the discussion about his statesmanship, and ask, What is he worth as a man? Yes, he mistakes the motive power which shapes the events of history. I find that in the life of free nations mere legal disquisitions never turned the tide of events, and mere constitutional constructions never determined the tendency of an age. The logic of things goes its steady way, immovable to eloquence and deaf to argument. It shapes and changes laws and constitutions according to its immutable rules, and those adverse to it will prove no effectual obstruction to its onward march. In times of great conflicts, the promptings and dictates of the human conscience are more potent than all the inventive ingenuity of the human brain. The conscience of a free people, when once fairly ruling the action of the masses, will never fail to make new laws, when those existing are contrary to its tendency, or it will put its own construction upon those that are there. Your disquisitions and plausibilities may be used as weapons and stratagems in a fencing match of contending parties, but powerless as they are before the conscience of man, posterity will remember them only as mere secondary incidents of a battle of great principles, in which the strongest motive powers of human nature were the true combatants.

There is the slavery question; not a mere occasional quarrel between the two sections of country, divided by a geographical line; not a mere contest between two economic interests for the preponderance; not a mere wrangle between two political parties for power and spoils; but the great struggle between two antagonistic systems of social organization; between advancing civilization and retreating barbarism; between the human