Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/163

Rh obtained by fair purchase and diplomatic transaction, war must be resorted to; and, if the majority of the people are not inclined to go to war, our international relations must be disturbed by filibustering expeditions, precipitating, if possible, this country into wars, thus forcing the peaceable or cheating the enthusiastic into subserviency to the plans of the slave power. You may call this piracy, disgracing us in the eyes of the civilized world. But can you deny that slavery needs power, and that it cannot obtain that power except by extension?

So, pressed by its necessities, it lays its hand upon our national territories. Time-honored compacts, hemming in slavery, must be abrogated. The Constitution must be so construed as to give slavery unlimited sway over our national domain. Hence your Nebraska bills and Dred Scott decisions and slave-code platforms. You may call that atrocious, but can you deny its consistency?

“But,” adds the slaveholder, “of what use to us is the abstract right to go with our slave property into the territories, if you pass laws which attract to the territories a class of population that will crowd out slavery; if you attract to them the foreign immigrant by granting to him the immediate enjoyment of political rights; if you allure the paupers from all parts of the globe by your preëmption laws and homestead bills? We want the negro in the territories. You give us the foreign immigrant. Slavery cannot exist except with the system of large farms, and your homestead bills establish the system of small farms, with which free labor is inseparably connected. We are, therefore, obliged to demand that all such mischievous projects be abandoned.” Nothing more plausible. Hence the right of the laboring man to acquire property in the soil by his labor is denied; your homestead bills voted down; the blight of oppressive speculation fastened on your virgin soil, and attempts are made to deprive the