Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/179

Rh suffer them to give up the struggle. The power of resistance, the elasticity of free society, cannot be exhausted by one, cannot be annihilated by a hundred defeats. Why? Because it receives new impulses, new inspirations from every day's work; it marches on in harmony with the spirit of the age.

There is but one way of settling the “irrepressible conflict.” It is not by resisting the spirit of the times, and by trying to neutralize its impelling power, for you attempt that in vain; but it is by neutralizing the obstacles which have thrown themselves in the path. There is no other. The irrepressible conflict will rage with unabated fury until our social and political development is harmonized with the irrepressible tendency of the age.

That is the solution which the Republicans propose. Their program is simple and consistent:—

Protection of our natural and constitutional rights.

Non-interference with the social and political institutions existing by the legislation of States. Exclusion of slavery from the national territories; they must be free because they are national.

Promotion and expansion of free labor by the homestead bill and the encouragement of home industry.

Will this effect a settlement of the conflict? Let the Fathers of this Republic answer the question, and I will give you the Southern construction of their policy. In a debate which occurred in the Senate of the United States, on the 23d of January, Mr. Mason of Virginia, said:

Now, as far as concerns our ancestry, I am satisfied of this—they were not abolitionists. On the contrary, I believe this was their opinion—their prejudice was aimed against the foreign slave-trade, the African slave-trade; and their belief was that, cutting that off, slavery would die out of itself, without any act of abolition. I attempted at one time to