Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/459

Rh of the South, without which they felt that slavery could not prosper in the Union. They did not hesitate a moment; they staked at once their all on the cast of war. After a fierce struggle of four years, they succumbed. They had sacrificed their peace, the prosperity of their country, their all, for slavery. They lost the battle and lost slavery with it.

What, then, could we, after all this, expect of them? Had we a right to expect that they would all at once drop their life-long notions, their inveterate prejudices, their violent propensities, their lawless habits and their whole love of slavery, while they were still denouncing the act of emancipation as an act of robbery, as a crime against the very order of nature? Had we a right to expect that they would, in good faith, welcome the system of free labor which they did not understand, of whose blessings they knew nothing and which had come down upon them as would a thunderbolt, first making itself known by its destructive force? And if, indeed, they might have been made to submit to all this under the relentless pressure of power and necessity, had we a right to expect that they would, in good faith, secure and develop what was so strange and distasteful to them if we put the power over it into their own hands? There never was a privileged class which gave up its privileges of its own free will and choice; there never was one that made important concessions unless they were extorted from it; there never was one which, after being compelled to surrender its privileges, did not take advantage of every available chance to recover them? Is there anything in the character of the Southern whites to make them an exception to this rule? Whatever their good qualities may be, the only three things which might have induced them to abandon their privileges without irresistible necessity are just those which they are most deficient in—a just regard for the