Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/465

Rh negro supremacy, with the most atrocious despotism the world ever saw, that had been established over the South—telling him, in the language of the Democratic candidate for the Vice-Presidency, that these laws must be trampled into the dust; that all that has been done for the restoration of the Union, since the close of the war, must be destroyed again, and that the Democratic President, to be elected, must send the army into the South to drive out the reconstructed State governments at the point of the bayonet. Indeed, if a proposition so atrocious, jeopardizing the peace of the country and the very existence of the Republic, does not find an excuse in the most conclusive, the most irresistible reasons, we shall be justified in regarding it as the hallucination of a madman, or as a criminal plot of malicious enemies to their country.

Let us see what these reasons are. They shall have our candid consideration. First, then, the Congressional policy of reconstruction is denounced by the Democratic party as unconstitutional. This is not the first time that the Democratic party has flourished this favorite weapon, which it seems to claim as all its own. Do you remember the winter and spring of 1861, when the rebellion first raised its head, and when every true man, following the warm impulse of patriotism and the voice of conscience, jumped forthwith at the conclusion, “If the life of the Republic is attempted by force, force must be used to save it”? Do you remember it? Then you remember, also, how the Democracy then gave vent to its patriotism in this profound Constitutional conundrum—“The Southern States may not have the Constitutional power to secede from the Union, but the Government of the Republic has no Constitutional right to keep them in the Union.” Had not the matter been so terribly serious, the world would have been convulsed with laughter when a great political party, with solemn air, blurted out so