Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/432

398 will stand ruined in her credit and covered with eternal disgrace.

Do not dismiss this as a mere wild alarm. Read the history of representative governments, and you will find that more than one financial scheme has been carried through, just as foul as this, and apparently far more hopeless. And what may we not look for at a moment like this, when the President openly uses the whole patronage of the Government as a machinery of corruption, and familiarizes his followers with the idea that conscience is a marketable commodity?

Truly, these are no wild alarms, and the country may indeed congratulate itself, if, after the supposed success of the Johnson policy, the reaction stops even there. It is not only possible, but probable, that with one gigantic sweep they will attempt to brush away all the legislation passed by Congress during the absence of the eleven rebel States, and all that was done by the Southern conventions and legislatures called and organized upon the basis of the provisional governments instituted by the President. We see already the premonitory symptoms. The President himself, by questioning in his veto messages the legality of Congressional legislation in the absence of the eleven States, has directed the reaction into that channel and indicated the current it must take. One of the President's principal spokesmen, Mr. Ewing, of Ohio, has published an elaborate argument intended to prove that bills passed by the present Congress over the President's veto have not the validity of laws; and a supreme [court] Judge in North Carolina openly pronounces the convention called in that State by order of the President, an illegal and revolutionary body, and the constitution adopted by it null and void. Is it possible not to perceive where such arguments must lead us? And is there a single result of the war, except the slaughtering of half a million of