Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/221

Rh ground that the war, as waged by the Federal Government, far from being a war of principle, was merely a war of policy, it was at the same time discovered that, from this point of view, much might be said in favor of the South. It is exceedingly difficult to make Europeans understand, not only why the free and prosperous North should fight merely for the privilege of being reassociated with the imperious and troublesome slave States, but also why the principle, by virtue of which a population sufficiently strong for establishing and maintaining an independent national existence possessing the right to have a government and institutions of its own choice, should be repudiated in America, while it is almost universally recognized in monarchical Europe. I have had to discuss this point with men whose sympathies were most sincerely on our side, and all my Constitutional arguments failed to convince them that such a right can be consistently denied, unless our cause was based upon principles of a higher nature. I know that journalists who in their papers work for us to the best of their ability, are secretly troubled with serious scruples on that point. The agents of the South, whose footprints are frequently visible in the public press, are availing themselves of this state of things with great adroitness. While they carefully abstain from alluding to the rights of slavery, they speak of free-trade and cotton to the merchant and the manufacturer, and of the right of self-government to the liberal. They keep it well before the people that the same means of repression which are of so baneful a memory to most European nations—the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, arbitrary imprisonment, the confiscation of newspapers, the use of armed force—are now found necessary to prop the Federal Government; and that the latter, in its effort to crush the independent spirit of eight millions of people, is with rapid strides approaching the line which