Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/466

432 and shameless an absurdity. But so it was. The great Constitutional argument against coercion enunciated by the Democratic President, Buchanan, and sustained by the party leaders and organs, with the criminal threat that if the soldiers of the Union marched out to coerce the rebellious South, a fire would be kindled in their rear.

Such was the Democratic construction of the Constitution then. What would have been the consequence if the American people had accepted it! The American people would have acknowledged, before the whole world, that this Government had no right and no power to defend its own existence. It would have presented the doleful and ridiculous spectacle of a government tumbling to pieces at the first show of resistance, from inherent constitutional inconsistency. This boasted experiment, this beacon-light of liberty-loving humanity, would have become the laughing-stock of the whole world, and for centuries the advocates of despotism would have triumphantly pointed to this most ridiculous failure as often as a friend of liberty dared to pronounce the word Republic.

The South would have gone her own way after her first success; she would have proved an insolent and exacting neighbor. War would have been the inevitable consequence. No national bonds would then have held together the East and the West; conflicts of interests would have led to new separations; these, to new collisions. Despised abroad, the little republics would have exhausted and ruined one another by incessant warfare among themselves, and America, once the hope of the oppressed, the pride of the free and the terror of the devotees of despotism, would have become the sport of foreign powers. Such would have been the inevitable consequence had the American people accepted the Democratic construction of the Constitution in 1861.