Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/169

Rh with police measures; he might as well try to fetter the winds with a rope. The South means to repress it with decisions of the Supreme Court; they might as well, like Xerxes, try to subdue the waves of the ocean by throwing chains into the water.

The conflict of constitutional constructions is, indeed, a mere incident of the great struggle, a mere symptom of the crisis. Long before the slavery question in the form of an abstract constitutional controversy agitated the public mind, the conflict of interests raged in our national councils. What mattered it that the struggle about the encouragement of home industry and internal improvements was not ostensibly carried on under the form of pro- and anti-slavery? What mattered it that your newfangled constitutional doctrines were not yet invented, when slavery tried to expand by the annexation of foreign countries; that no Dred Scott decision was yet cooked up, when the right of petition was curtailed, when attempts were made to arrest the discussion of the slavery question all over the Union, and when the trial by jury and the writ of habeas corpus were overridden by the fugitive-slave law? And even lately, when the slave power, with one gigantic grasp, attempted to seize the whole of our national domain, what else was and is your new constitutional doctrine but an ill-disguised attempt to clothe a long-cherished design with the color of law?

Read your history with an impartial eye, and you will find that the construction of the Constitution always shaped itself according to the prevailing moral impulses or the predominance of the material over political interests. The logic of our minds is but too apt to follow in the track of our sympathies and aspirations. It was when the South had control of the government that acts were passed for the raising of duties on imports, for the creation of a national bank, and in aid of the American shipping interest.