Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/521

Rh process of tremendous significance. Yes, the Constitution of the United States has been changed in some most essential points; that change does amount to a great revolution, and this bill is one of its legitimate children. Let us look those facts in the face, and I think we may derive from them some conclusions which may be of service in the discussion of the provisions of this bill. What was that Constitutional revolution which the Democrats denounce as so fearful an outrage? In order to understand it fully, we must cast a look back and see what the Constitutional polity of the United States was before the civil war, according to the Democratic interpretation of the Constitution then prevailing.

Constitutions and constitutional constructions do not spring from a mere process of philosophical speculation and reasoning. They grow out of conditions, circumstances, events, sympathies, prevailing interests. We all remember that the most powerful political interest in this country for a long period previous to the war was that of slavery. We remember also that the slave-power, finding itself at war with the conscience of mankind, condemned by the enlightened spirit of this age, menaced by adverse interests growing stronger and stronger every day, sought safety behind the bulwark of what they euphoniously called local self-government and intrenched itself in the doctrine of State sovereignty. To be sure, it made, from that defensive position, offensive sallies encroaching on the rights of the non-slaveholding States, as for instance in the case of the notorious fugitive-slave law and the attempt to take possession of the whole territorial domain of this Republic; but the doctrine of State sovereignty was its main citadel, its base of operations.

What was this dogma? It was asserted and accepted as a fundamental principle, as the peculiarly democratic feature of our republican system of government, that the