Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/522

488 several geographical and political subdivisions of this Republic called the States should not only have the right to govern and manage their own home affairs, independent of all interference on the part of the National authority, but also to determine for themselves whether their whole population, or only a part, and what part, should participate in the management of their common concerns, that is to say, in the functions of self-government. In other words, the doctrine was that the States had the right to subject a large portion of their people to the absolute dominion and despotic rule of another portion, and to determine at their discretion by what means that despotic rule of man over man should be set on foot and perpetuated, no matter how flagrantly hostile those means might be to the fundamental rights and liberties upon which the whole fabric of free government rests. That was the Democratic doctrine of State sovereignty. It was called the principal safeguard of popular self-government, and canonized with the name of true and genuine democracy. And now look at some of those monstrous political fallacies in which that doctrine of true self-government and genuine democracy resulted; and when I have stated them you will at once discern their consanguinity with the very arguments which have been urged upon this floor against our Constitutional amendments and that legislation which is necessary to enforce them.

It was held that true liberty implied the right of one man to hold another man as his slave. It was held and believed that the United States could not be a truly republican organization unless the several States had the power to maintain and perpetuate undemocratic institutions. It was held that true self-government consisted in the very fact that the several States of this Union should have the power to exclude any number, however large, of their population from the exercise of all the functions