Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/176

142 of non-intervention” which, according to his own testimony, strengthens slavery by increasing the number of slave States and their representation and power in the general government; to which is to be added the annexation of Cuba and the northern States of Mexico, out of which an additional number of slave States is to be carved. But his Northern friends say that he is the champion of free labor—and they are honorable men.

Oh! what a deep-seated, overweening confidence Mr. Douglas, when he made this statement, must have had in the unfathomable, desperate, incorrigible stupidity of those Northern Democrats who support him for the purpose of baffling and punishing the fire-eaters of the South. Good, innocent souls, do they not see that by supporting Mr. Douglas's policy which throws into the lap of slavery territory after territory, they will strengthen and render more overbearing the very same slave power they mean to baffle and punish? Do they not see that they were preparing a lash for their own backs? It is true, when they feel it—and they deserve to feel it—they may console themselves that it is a whip of their own manufacture.

At last we arrive at the program of the slave power in its open and undisguised form, of which Mr. Breckenridge is the representative and Mr. Douglas the servant, although he does not wear its livery except on occasions of state.

This program is as follows: The agitation of the slavery question, North and South, is to be arrested; the fugitive-slave law, in its present form, is to be strictly carried out, and all State legislation impeding its execution to be repealed; the constitutional right of slavery to occupy the territories of the United States and to be protected there is to be acknowledged; all measures tending to impede the ingress of slavery and its establishment in