Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/198

178 acquainted with the Senator from Massachusetts, I think I can give my friend from Indiana the consoling assurance that nothing of the kind was in the mind of the Senator from Massachusetts. Whatever the report of the commission sent on a mission of investigation to San Domingo may be, I do not think it is likely to shed such a flood of light on the subject as to materially alter the judgment of the Senate. I should therefore deem it unnecessary to forestall anything with regard to the San Domingo treaty, for I am living in the hope that the fate of that treaty is already sealed.

The Senator from Wisconsin [Mr. ] opened with a most beautiful exordium, revealing to us a very remarkable acquaintance with the events of ancient and modern history. He slaughtered, one after another, Solomon, Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Casca, William Pitt and Daniel Webster, with merciless rigor, and finally closed the column with my friend from Massachusetts. Really, sir, it was a brave sight to see him standing, with his fatal hatchet, scalping one after another, and proving that all these great men, toward the close of their lives, had entirely lost their mental faculties. Very sad, indeed. But as to the conclusion he desired to draw, that the course of the Senator from Massachusetts is also owing to a failure of his mental faculties, I cannot refrain from replying that the difficulty seems to be far less with the failure of the mental strength of the Senator from Massachusetts than with the failure of the moral strength of others.

I do not enter into this debate for the purpose of affecting in any way the result of the San Domingo negotiation; for my arguments against that treaty stand on a different ground. I enter into it solely for the purpose of raising my voice in vindication of sound Constitutional government; for no man can have listened to the discussion on the