Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/280

246 for a dictatorship, and the accompanying threat became a defiance. The people of the North rose up and said: “So far and no farther!” Then slavery, with fatal madness, raised its arm against the palladium which cannot be touched with impunity; it urged into our hands the sword of self-defence; with blind insolence it threw into the face of the Nation the final challenge: “Kill me or I will kill thee!” The challenge could not be declined; the Nation refused to be killed, and slavery had the full benefit of its defiance. Do you not see that this decree of self-destruction was written by a hand mightier than that of mortal man?

And you will stand up against it? What are you about to do? Stop and consider! Slavery is dying fast. Its life is ebbing out of a thousand mortal wounds. Even its nearest friends in rebeldom are standing around its death bed in utter despair; even they give it up. Hardly anything remains to be done but to close its eyelids, and to write the coroner's verdict: “Slavery having challenged the American Nation to mortal combat, killed itself by running madly into the sword of its antagonist.” There it lies. And you—you would revive it? What? That you should have served it when it was in the fulness of its power, that, with a violent stretch of charity, we may understand, although it revolted our hearts. But to revive it when it is dying! To think of galvanizing into new life the hideous carcass whose vitality is being extinguished by the hand of fate! To attempt to fasten anew and artificially upon the Nation a curse of which for a century she longed in vain to be rid, and which at last is being wiped out by the great process of providential retribution! To resuscitate and nurse to new power of mischief the traitress that fell in an attempt to assassinate the Republic! Revive slavery in the midst of the nineteenth century!

Have you considered the enormity of the undertaking! Look around you! You see a great Republic purified of