Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/487

Rh new-comers shall think and act just as they do; and if these new-comers entertain and express principles and ideas materially differing from those traditional in the South, they are denounced as vile carpet-baggers and rascally scalawags, and threatened with expulsion by force if they do not go voluntarily. But if those new-comers really did accommodate themselves to the traditional Southern ways of thinking and acting, what would they be good for? Look at the Northern States, from which the most useful of those immigrants come. The people of the Northern States have attained their high degree of prosperity and civilization just because they do not think and act as the Southern people are wont to do. They owe their culture, their wealth, their social advancement to the very fact that, unlike the Southern people, they admit and encourage the utmost freedom of inquiry and discussion; that they recognize and protect the dignity of labor in the meanest laborer; that no class of society can claim rights and privileges for itself which are not also granted and secured to the other classes. If, now, as the Southern people will have it, immigrants coming from the North give up all these principles and rules of action, their main value to the South will be lost, their energy and enterprise will be hampered, their capacity for progressive improvement will be emasculated. What the Southern people want is not an increase, not a reinforcement of their old stock of ideas and habits of life; they have entered upon a new order of things, and they want new thoughts, new impulses, new energies, new rules of action. They want what differs from their traditional notions, just because it differs from them.

Under such circumstances, it sounds so sadly ludicrous when we hear them indignantly complain that their “first men,” their old tried statesmen, are thrown aside for new-comers. Well, what is the damage? What have their