Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/286

266 closed your eyes to the fact that they actually were so used when legislative and municipal bodies were for a time left free to act upon their own instincts? Would you not have apprehended that new causes of dissension and conflict would thus speedily arise? I appeal to you as sensible men. Think of it, and you will find far less of the motive of vindictiveness in what took place.

You have greeted me here as a friend of the Southern people, and so I am; and I affirm that I was just as sincere and warm a friend of the Southern people when, after the close of the war, I followed this course of reasoning. The actual state of the Southern mind, with the passions of the war still alive and aggravated by stinging misfortune, and with its sincere belief in the utter impossibility of the success of free labor with their laboring population, will necessarily lead the Southern people to attempt all possible experiments, except that of free labor in its true form; and yet free labor must be maintained, secured and developed, or we shall at some future day have to fight the old battle over again, which would be a most disastrous misfortune to the country in general, and to the South in particular. What is to be done? There is this alternative: either we must go on protecting free labor and the rights of free laborers through the power of the National Government, which would result in continual interference of the National authority in State concerns, and the gradual undermining of local self-government, or we must enable free labor to protect and regulate itself by giving the free laborer the political means with which to maintain his rights; and then the development of free labor may soon be left to the operations of local self-government. And this can be done only by guaranteeing, through the Constitution of the Republic, to all citizens, the emancipated class included, those political privileges with which a free man maintains his rights. And hence I advocated