Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/473

Rh thick carpet, lest the step of the sentinel should disturb the sweet slumbers of the rebel chief. But even he is now released, to have his ears tickled with the cheers of the blockade runners of Liverpool. There is Mr. Doolittle's military despotism. Does that Senator really mean to lie when he prates about the atrocities of Hungary and Poland? No, I acquit him of that; he possesses in an eminent degree the faculty of talking nonsense in perfect good faith. He has succeeded in fortifying his native stupidity with a bulwark of ignorance which I recognize as fairly impregnable. I will leave him to his glory. Military despotism! You will search the annals of the world in vain for a rebellion, after the failure of which the vanquished were treated with such merciful mildness, with such boundless generosity by the conquerors, as they were here. The very insolence with which those who, but yesterday, strove to destroy the Republic, insist upon ruling it to-day, is irrefutable proof of the fact.

But I am, indeed, willing to admit that our military governments in the South may be called despotisms, if we apply to them the Democratic standard of liberty. Since the Democratic party identified itself with the slave-power, it has always held this as one of its fundamental doctrines: That true liberty consists in the right of one man to strip another man of his rights. The Southern Democrat did not consider himself a free man if he was not permitted to “wallop a nigger” whenever it pleased him, and the Northern Democrat insisted that this inalienable privilege be scrupulously respected. That one man should have a right to hold another man as his slave was, in the opinion of the Democrats, one of the essential conditions, without which free institutions could not exist; and that this right of one class of society over another should be extended over the Territories of this Republic was demanded by the Democracy in the name of