Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/278

244 submits to the assertions of his supporters that he will be obliged to stand on the platform; a party which was waiting two months for a policy, and then found its policy upset by events two days after it had been declared; a party floundering like a drunken man between a treacherous peace and a faithful war, between disunion that shall not be and a kind of union that cannot be; a party which is like a ship without compass and rudder, with a captain who declares that he will not do what he is hired to do, with a set of officers who swear that he shall do it, with a crew who were enticed on board by false pretences, and who are kept by the vague impression that there is some thing good in the kitchen, and that vessel bound for a port which does not exist on the map. Is not this picture true in every touch?

And why all this wild confusion of ideas and cross purposes? Why all these ridiculous absurdities in its propositions? Simply because that party refuses to stand upon the clear and irrevocable developments of history, and denies the stern reality of accomplished facts; because it repudiates the great and inexorable laws by which human events are governed; because it shuts its eyes against the manifest signs of the times; because, while pretending to save the Union, it protects the Union's sworn enemy; because it deems it consistent with loyalty to keep alive the mother of treason; in one word, because it insists upon saving slavery in spite of its suicidal crime. And to this most detestable monomania it is ready to subordinate every other principle, every other interest, every other consideration of policy. To save slavery it throws all imaginable impediments in the way of every measure of the Government directed against the main strength of the rebellion; to save slavery it would rather have seen our armies doomed to defeat by weakness than strengthened for victory by the colored element; to save