Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/539

Rh out to your partisans the prospect of their overthrow, and of the subversion of all that has been accomplished for the final settlement of our controversies and the peace of the country.

Yes, make up your minds, gentlemen, to the fact that your old doctrines are exploded forever and cannot be revived. Give up your useless and disturbing agitation against accomplished results. Go to your Southern friends and counsel them not to ruin themselves by vainly resisting the inevitable. Thus you will do more for the cause of self-government, more to prevent a dangerous centralization of power, you will render a far higher service to this generation and to posterity, than by indulging in those lugubrious wails and lamentations to which you have accustomed us on the floor of the Senate—the lamentation that we are governed by an atrocious despotism because one man shall no longer have the right to deprive another man of his rights; that self-government has received its death-blow because nobody shall henceforth be excluded from its exercise, and that liberty has fled forever from these shores because at last the Republic has thrown her protecting shield over the rights of all, even the lowliest of her children.

Mr. President, I do not stand here to plead the cause of my party only. If I did so, if there were nothing nearer and dearer to my heart than partisan success and partisan power, I should hold very different language. I would then say to my Democratic friends, “By all means go on with your opposition against the results of the war; go on with your mischievous warfare against the new order of things; go on with vain and disturbing agitation to restore what has ceased to be and can never again be;” for if they do, they will only prove that they are still living in a past which this Nation has long outgrown; that they are still bent upon sacrificing the interests of the living generation