Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/299

Rh harsh intermeddling with your local concerns; they would even have forced their representatives in Congress to act according to those sentiments but for one thing, and that one thing consists in the occurrence of the very acts of violence and persecution which the Ku-Klux law is intended to check and punish. And if there are demagogues and advocates of centralized government among the leaders of the Republican party, who would devise such legislation for the mere purpose of serving party interests, or of unduly strengthening the Central Government, they would have been rendered powerless by their own constituents long ago, had not the feelings and sympathies of those constituents been affected by the harassing tales which came from some of the Southern States, and which could not be denied. In other words, violations of sound Constitutional principles and encroachments upon local self-government in this direction would have been easily prevented, had not, by a number of most reprehensible occurrences, grave doubts been raised in the popular mind as to whether local self-government affords sufficient guarantees for that security of life and property and individual rights which every American citizen claims as his due. The impression was produced that it did not, and as long as this impression is suffered to exist, the tendency to accomplish by the arm of the Central Government what local self-government appears to be unable to accomplish, will grow stronger every day; it may grow so strong as to render all efforts to stem it by argument utterly useless, for that tendency will be fed and supported by human sympathies and emotions of which nobody will deny that they spring from the generous impulse to aid the persecuted and helpless, an impulse which would be as strong in you as in them under corresponding circumstances. This is the truth and cannot be too clearly understood.