Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/412

378 rallies for an attempt to recover what it has lost, the victors are off their guard, and the results of the victory are again put in question. These results will be safe only if the victors have been wise enough to have them firmly imbedded in political forms of institutions so well fixed and fortified that the tide of the reaction, however furious, cannot shake or move them. But these results may again be lost or grievously impaired, if the victors in foolish confidence have neglected to surround them with impregnable safeguards. New, protracted and dangerous struggles will inevitably be the consequence. History teaches us this lesson on thousands of its most instructive pages, and no true statesman will close his eyes against it.

That period of reaction after our glorious victory for National Union and human liberty has now come upon us and it is the more formidable and dangerous as one of the great powers of the state has made himself its agent and champion. I shall attempt to analyze its nature and the situation in which it has placed us, with fairness, but without reserve; and I invite you to follow my reasoning with that intellectual honesty which shrinks from no conclusions of logic.

When the civil war had come to a close, the problem presented itself of what is commonly called reconstruction. The principal difficulty of that problem consisted then, and consists now, in this: The political system of this Republic rests upon the right of the people to control their local concerns in their several States by the operations of self-government, subject to certain restrictions imposed by the National Constitution, and in the right to coöperate with one another in the government of the whole. This system was not to be changed in the work of reconstruction; but it was evident also that if reconstruction was to accomplish only the mere setting in motion again of the machinery of government as it had been previous