Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/504

470 by showing them the deceitful picture of a possible reaction. By wild harangues you excited them to stubborn resistance to the new order of things. You inflamed their worst passions by appealing to their worst prejudices; and, alas! they believed you once more. And now see what you have done. The South, in a new attack of that delirium which the defeat of the rebellion had happily abated, and the repulsive manifestations of which you yourselves now vainly endeavor to restrain; the old terrorism, the old violence, the old mania for the exercise of unrighteous power; and thus three years since the end of the war have been wantonly squandered—three years, which might have given them peace, but for you. And yet, if you are not blind to the signs of the times, you know that all the hopes you have excited are vain. You know what they are struggling for can never be restored, and what they are struggling against is bound to come. You must know that this will be a Republic of free labor and equal rights. And yet you are still pouring oil into the flame of their madness—nay, you are urging the sword into their hands, which you know they can raise only for self-destruction. Democrats of the North, are your consciences dead? Have you no hearts, no pity for your Southern victims! Have their destroyed cities, their devastated fields, have the hundreds of thousands of their sons whose blood they have sacrificed at your instigation, not yet given you your fill? Shall the agony of those whom you have goaded on from error to error, from crime to crime, from disaster to disaster, be continued forever? Will you never give them a chance to return to reason? What have the poor Southern people done to you, that you should never cease to persecute them with your cruel, relentless, murderous, fiendish friendship? Is it not as if the policy of your party were born of the love of mischief for mischief's sake? When contemplating this appalling