Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/397

Rh is, whether the promise and good intentions of the thinking men will be sufficient to restrain and control the populace, whose animosity against “Yankee interlopers” is only second to their hostile feeling against the negro. If the military forces of the Government should be soon and completely withdrawn, I see reasons to fear that in many localities immigrants would enjoy the necessary security only when settling down together in numbers strong enough to provide for their own protection. On the whole, no better encouragement can be given to immigration, as far as individual security is concerned, than the assurance that the National Government will be near to protect them until such protection is no longer needed.

The South needs capital. But capital is notoriously timid and averse to risk itself, not only where there actually is trouble, but where there is serious and continual danger of trouble. Capitalists will be apt to consider—and they are by no means wrong in doing so—that no safe investments can be made in the South as long as Southern society is liable to be convulsed by anarchical disorders. No greater encouragement can, therefore, be given to capital to transfer itself to the South than the assurance that the Government will continue to control the development of the new social system in the late rebel States until such dangers are averted by a final settlement of things upon a thorough free-labor basis.

How long the National Government should continue that control depends upon contingencies. It ought to cease as soon as its objects are attained; and its objects will be attained sooner and with less difficulty if nobody is permitted to indulge in the delusion that it will cease before they are attained. This is one of the cases in which a determined policy can accomplish much, while a halfway policy is liable to spoil things already accomplished. The continuance of the National control in the South,