Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/513

Rh only into the hands of the trustworthy, and being as severe in our judgment on our party friends as we are apt to be on our opponents. We have to raise the public credit by a scrupulous faithfulness to our obligations. We have to lighten our public burdens and develop the prosperity of the country, not merely by schemes of financial management, but by striking out from our constitutions and laws the trammels which clog the spirit of industrial enterprise, by opening the resources of the land through a network of railroad communications and by developing the intelligence and stimulating the public spirit of our people through an efficient system of education.

My Republican friends, we have already accomplished so much that we shall not recoil before any task, be it ever so great. And we can accomplish all this, if, instead of chaining ourselves down to the narrow gauge of party dogmatism, we adhere to its great rule of original Republicanism, to keep the main ends to be reached firmly in view, by admitting and encouraging in our ranks free thought, free inquiry, free discussion as to the means by which those ends are to be reached. Thus we shall not repel but attract all those whose hearts are open to the impulse of patriotism, and whose minds are able to under stand their own interests in connection with those of the whole. We shall make every man of intelligence and honest aspirations feel that he belongs to us, and that here is his place.

Indeed, whenever you cast your eyes over this great Republic where do you find a State that opens a wider field for a noble ambition than Missouri? With her unbounded resources, her vast prairies still untilled by the plow, her wooded hills, her mineral wealth still sleeping in the mountains, her magnificent water communications, her unparalleled geographical position, designating her as the central thoroughfare of the greatest highway of trade