Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/486

452 stupidity of their followers! If it is true that in two or three of the Southern States the colored people outnumber the whites, while in all the others the whites are in an overwhelming majority, and that a number of whites are disfranchised for participation in the rebellion, is it not equally true that the whites possess nearly all the real property, all the capital, all the social influence, all the advantage of education, all the political experience, and that of this vast enginery of social and political power the colored people, just emerged from slavery, are almost wholly destitute? And yet, in spite of all this, the blacks are to tread the whites in the dust? If, indeed, the nine millions are not enough to stand their ground against the three and a half millions of blacks, we are ready to send them a reinforcement of carpet-baggers to help them maintain their white preponderance. I do not say this jokingly; I am in earnest. Is not every man who emigrates to the South from the Northern States or from Europe, a white man? The negroes do not find the Ku-Klux atmosphere of the South so pleasing as to be attracted by it. Yes, every emigrant Southward-bound is a white man, and he helps to fortify the ascendancy of the white race there. And if the Southern people were not so foolish as to drive away new-comers who do not agree with them in politics, with petty annoyances and persecutions, and even bloody threats and violence, there would probably have been an increase of the white population in the South of one or two millions since the close of the war.

Indeed, it is a singular sort of infatuation, of lunacy, I might almost say, which possesses the Southern people in this respect. What they want for the restoration and development of their prosperity is immigration, capital, industry, an influx of new and stirring elements. They recognize this in the abstract; but when immigrants do present themselves, the Southern whites demand that the