Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/475

Rh as a second Washington for respecting the Democratic liberty of the assassin.

If you want to measure the effect which this nefarious doctrine—that true liberty consists in the right of one man to deprive of his rights another—has had upon the political development of the country, see what it has made of the Democratic party itself. No sooner had that party wedded itself to that atrocious heresy than it became at once incapable of any progressive idea. The world marched on, but that party remained lashed to its savage idol with a chain it could not break. Look at its platforms from year to year, from decade to decade. Not a single proposition for the intellectual and moral advancement of society. Not a thought for the elevation of human nature. Nothing but a dreary and hopeless repetition of the old song, that one class of men must have the freedom to tyrannize over another, and that when one man deprives another of his rights nobody has a right to interfere. This year some credulous men and women deluded themselves into the belief that the Democratic party could become an engine of progress. Preposterous expectation! The temptation was indeed great, the prospect enticing, but there is the New York platform, and the candidates manifestoes, and what do you behold? Ranting denunciations of Congress, because it contrived to secure the rights of the emancipated slave against the rapacity of the master-class and the fierce demand that that master-class must be reinstated, even at the point of the bayonet, if need be, in the Constitutional right to strip of his right whomsoever it pleases. No, I will not be unjust to the Democratic platform; it does recognize the fact that secession has been defeated and slavery abolished. Aye, indeed, four years—which in days like these amount to half a century—four years it hobbles painfully after the greatest events of our times, and reluctantly comes at last