Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/157

Rh It is one of the best traits of human nature that we form our first opinions on matters of general interest from our innate sense of right and wrong. Our moral impressions, the dictates of our consciences, the generous impulses of our hearts, are the sources from which our first convictions spring. But custom, material interest, and our natural inclination to acquiesce in that which is, whether right or wrong, that vis inertiæ which has brought so much suffering upon humanity, are apt to overrule the native instincts of our moral nature. They are sicklied o'er by the pale cast of calculation; the freshness of their impelling power is lost, and questions essentially moral are imperceptibly changed into questions of material interest, national economy, or political power.

The people of the South have evidently gone through that process in regard to the institution of slavery; they have become accustomed to identify its existence with the existence of Southern society, while even a large majority of the people of the North were rather inclined to silence their moral objections to it, and to acquiesce, until its immediate interference with matters of general interest gave a new impulse to their native antipathy. Although I am not ashamed to confess, that the moral merits of the question would alone have been more than sufficient to make me an anti-slavery man, yet I will confine myself to a discussion of its practical effects, in order to make myself intelligible even to those who do not sympathize with me. This is the first time that I have had the honor to address a meeting in a slave State, and even now I owe the privilege of expressing my opinions freely and without restraint to the circumstance that, although in a slave State, I stand upon the soil of a free city, and under the generous protection of free men. Must I call “a privilege” what ought to be universally respected as the sacred birthright of every American citizen?