Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/29

Rh of a most beneficent and wonderful transformation. You would find society everywhere moving again in the quiet channel of productive activity; you would find the minds of the people absorbed with railroad enterprises and mines and new fields of agricultural labor; you would find the school-house, against which the old pro-slavery prejudice had been so bitterly fighting, in successful operation; you would find the late slave securely enjoying his new rights as a freeman; you would find the late rebel obeying the laws, paying his taxes, and working peaceably by the side of the Union man as a good neighbor; you would find, even in those places which during the war had been specially noted for their rebellious spirit, society in a more peaceful and orderly condition than it had ever been there, not only during, but even before the rebellion. You would, in one word, find the new order of things rapidly working itself into the daily habits and the ordinary ways of thinking of the whole people. And if you heard here and there a hare-brained individual still indulge in an occasional swagger of the rebellious kind, you would find also that his voice is deadened by the very air surrounding him, like a voice on the sea which awakens no echo.

But a short time ago you would have found only one fountain of bitter feeling still flowing; and that fountain consisted in those very laws which cut off thousands and thousands of citizens from all the political rights of citizenship while they were fulfilling its duties and bearing its burdens. Of all living institutions this was the only one daily reminding the people of the great conflict, of the passions which had inflamed them, of the hatred which they had borne to one another; the only one calculated to rekindle the old bitter rancor of the vanquished against the conqueror, and to prevent the revival of that fraternal feeling among children of the same country