Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/291

Rh of their inevitable reproduction? Let everybody consult his common-sense. The answer can not be doubtful.

But you tell us that the revolutionary period has fostered the habit of using arbitrary power, and that thereby the rights of all of us are threatened. Yes, it has produced that dangerous tendency; yes, by that tendency not your rights alone, but the rights of us all, the principles of Constitutional government, are threatened. It is unquestionably true that things are done with impunity, and almost without censure, well calculated to alarm every true friend of free institutions; and it is time that thinking men should seriously consider how, by concerted and determined action, they can prevent that tendency from undermining our whole Constitutional system. Now that the exigencies of great public peril are over, and the results of the war are firmly imbedded in the fundamental law—now, indeed, is the time to arrest it, lest the people drift into a laxity of Constitutional notions, from which they can not recover. And in order to arrest it, we must not recoil from vigorous means. When I, the other day, in a public speech in Chicago, declared that I would not support President Grant for reëlection, on account of the flagrant violations of the Constitution he has committed in the San Domingo case, a great many of my Republican brethren were shocked beyond measure, and raised the cry of high treason against the party, while some of the feeble in mind exclaimed that my making such a declaration was a sure sign that I must have been disappointed in the matter of patronage. I may assure them that I spoke with cool and mature deliberation; for it will not do to trifle with such cases.

I will not here argue the San Domingo matter over again, but I will say simply this: when the President orders the Navy of the United States to a foreign country, and, without condescending to ask Congress for authority,