Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/488

454 old and tried Southern statesmen—their Davises, their Toombses, their Slidells, and their Masons—what have they done for the South? They have simply shown their utter incapacity to comprehend the irresistible tendency of this age against slavery and all kindred systems of social organization. Modern Don Quixotes, they insisted upon perpetuating and raising to dominant power institutions which were manifestly doomed to destruction by the progressive spirit of the nineteenth century. To this crazy infatuation they have sacrificed the peace, the prosperity, even the lives, of hundreds of thousands of the Southern people. They have been the ruin of their country. And now the Southern whites insist upon digging them up again from their political graves to the ruin of their country once more. What a senseless idea! The merest adventurer of the class they contemptuously call “carpet-baggers,” if his interests and sympathies are in any way identified with the new order of things, is of ten times more real value to the South than the most renowned of the old and tried statesmen, who, with incorrigible stubbornness, are still worshipping their old broken idols. The Southern people ought to remember that, as the Scripture says, “new wine should not be put into old bottles, lest the old bottles burst and the new wine be spilled.” And methinks most of those old Southern bottles have already done such an amount of bursting that they ought to be let alone. Nay, instead of repelling with barbarous fierceness what they really need, let the Southern people welcome every man who comes to them to identify his interest with theirs. Let them welcome him the more heartily if he brings new ideas and new energies to supply their deplorable deficiencies. Let them not complain that among the first comers there are many adventurers, for it is always the adventurer who has to blaze the track where men are called upon to launch into