Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/283

Rh which produced the struggle also defeated your efforts, must it not be equally true that that cause is hopelessly lost and can never be revived? Is it not absolutely certain that every attempt to revive it must inevitably result in new disasters, disasters more terrible still, perhaps, than those which have already passed over you? You say you do not think of reviving it. Very well. But I go further, and affirm that as the cause of slavery is irretrievably lost, so you can not attempt to restore or maintain anything that has any affinity to slavery, without great injury to yourselves. Let me explain my meaning.

That slavery could not have survived the war must be clear to every thinking mind. The emancipation of the slaves brought on a new order of things in the South. Your social and political organization had to be adapted to free labor. What could that organization be? It could be only an organization based upon the principle which is the very life element of free labor society—the principle of equal rights. And here I have to express my opinion upon a matter which has been the source of great dissatisfaction and acrimonious feeling in the South. I mean the so-called reconstruction measures. It seems to have been the prevailing impression in the South that the reconstruction measures were the offspring of a spirit of hatred and vindictiveness animating the Northern people. I assure you, and I know whereof I speak, that nothing could be farther from the truth. An overwhelming majority of the people of the North and of Northern Republicans never hated the people of the South, not even during the war. And when the war was over, they followed a course which presented itself to their minds as a stern necessity. They followed it with hesitation and diffidence. I invite you to examine it. The time has arrived when the two great sections of the country should become just to each other, in dispassionate feeling and