Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/439

Rh outrage when the rebels keep Union men out of office because they are Union men?

Show me in the history of the world a single example of a great rebellion, the suppression of which was attended with such mildness and magnanimity. If there were any proof wanted to demonstrate the greatness of that magnanimity, it would be found in the fact that the same men whose lives were forfeited by the law, and who but yesterday escaped the halter, are to-day vociferously complaining of our cruelty because we do not just yet want them to rule us to-morrow. Nay, the provisions of the Constitutional amendment are so evidently just and proper that it has neither been attacked on its own merits by the President, who certainly is not disinclined to attack every thing that comes from that body which “hangs upon the verge of the government,” nor even by the distinguished gentlemen who did all the speaking for the Philadelphia Convention.

But here we encounter the great staple argument of the Johnson party. It is that, however proper, just and necessary the provisions of the Constitutional amendment may be, the Government has no right to make its ratification a condition precedent to the readmission of the rebel States; they always have been States; they have never ceased to be States; they are States now; and as such they are entitled to all the rights and privileges of other States. I will not follow our opponents into a metaphysical disquisition on the nature of a State, for it is not necessary for the purpose of proving the utter absurdity of their position.

Who does not know that a great civil war is subject to the same rules of public law as a foreign war? Is it not a principle of common-sense as well as a principle approved by every publicist of note since the world has had a literature, that the victor in a civil war, as well as in an