Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/172

138 The conflict stands there with the stubborn brutal force of reality. However severely it may disturb the nerves of timid gentlemen, there it stands and speaks the hard, stern language of fact. I understand well that great problems and responsibilities should be approached with care and caution. But times like these demand the firm action of men who know what they will, and will do it; not that eunuch policy which, conscious of its own unproductiveness, invites us blandly to settle down into the imbecile contentment of general impotency. They cannot ignore the conflict if they would, but have not nerve enough to decide it if they could.

The next party that claims our attention is the so-called Democracy. As it is my object to discuss the practical, not the constitutional merits of the problem before us, I might pass over the divisions existing in that organization. In fact, the point that separates Mr. Douglas from Mr. Breckenridge is but a mere quibble, a mere matter of etiquette. Mr. Douglas is unwilling to admit in words what he has a hundred times admitted in fact—for, can you tell me what practical difference in the world there is between direct and indirect intervention by Congress in favor of slavery and that kind of non-intervention by Congress which merely consists in making room for direct intervention by the Supreme Court? And besides, in nearly all practical measures of policy, Mr. Douglas is regularly to be found on the side of the extreme South. Like that great statesman of yours (I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for alluding to him in decent political company) he always votes against measures for the encouragement of home industry, perhaps because he does not understand them. He is one of the firmest supporters of the ascendency of the planters' interests in our economic questions, and, as to the extension of slavery by conquest and annexation, the