Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/551

Rh Welcome all who honestly mean to coöperate with us for the good of the country.

A word to the colored people. You have just been admitted to the exercise of political rights. It has cost a long and terrible struggle to break your chains. Your trials are not ended yet. For a long time yet you will have to contend against unjust and unreasonable, but stubborn, prejudices. And now, there are unscrupulous men who advise you, when you are to exercise the franchise for the first time, to use that franchise for the purpose of continuing the disfranchisement of others. Do you not see that such a course cannot fail to strengthen the prejudices which are still arrayed against you? If you are wise you will repel those who thus strive to seduce and make tools of you, as your most dangerous enemies, for it must be clear to every one of you that your rights can be secure only if no other class of citizens is deprived of the privileges which you enjoy. Your safety can be only in a perfect equality of rights. As your sincere and lifelong friends, we call upon you to aid in establishing it. We know that many of your race are already on our side. But if you understand your true interests you will make it manifest that the colored people en mass, without exception, cast their first ballots in favor of giving back the ballot to those who are now deprived of it. Only thus can you establish that fraternal feeling between you and all other classes of citizens, which is so essential to your welfare.

Fellow-citizens, in laying before you the reasons compelling us to refuse our acquiescence in the action of the convention which disregarded the great pledges of the Republican party, we do not mean to say that all those who remained in that convention were responsible for the faithlessness and trickery of the spoilsmen and proscriptionists who controlled it. We know of many well-meaning men who, although at heart convinced of the