Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/287

Rh the Constitutional amendments guaranteeing equal rights before the law, and impartial suffrage. And as delay threatened increased difficulties, I favored their speedy enactment and adoption.

I know that when I reasoned thus the motive of hatred and vindictiveness, so foreign to my nature, had no share in my conclusions. I was, on the contrary, most sincerely convinced that the speedy and irreversible settlement of the question on this basis would be the greatest attainable blessing to the country, and especially to the South. This may appear a bold and startling assertion to some of you, in view of the practical difficulties which, in the South, have sprung from this very settlement. Those difficulties I know well, and I do not under-estimate them. They arose naturally from the revolution of a labor system, and from the introduction into the body-politic of a large number of voters, a considerable portion of whom are uneducated and inexperienced, and who, in many instances, permit themselves to be led by unscrupulous politicians, much to the detriment of public interest. I recognize the full significance of this fact, and shall, in another part of my remarks, discuss the means by which its evil consequences may, in a great measure, be modified. But I invite you now to contemplate the difficulties which certainly would have arisen had this mode of settlement not been adopted. No thinking man can doubt what would have happened. A large portion of the Southern people would have persistently refused to recognize the exact truth as to their situation. They would have continued to waste their energies in useless efforts to preserve as much as possible of the old system of labor, and to keep up that confusion in the working of the social machinery, which is now gradually subsiding. Those acrimonious political struggles, which we witnessed three and four years ago, would have been indefinitely extended.