Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/311

Rh lines swarm with smugglers, and our customhouses with unfaithful officers.

And now, if you appreciate and care for your own interests, should you not, with spirit and alacrity, lend a helping hand in bringing on the downfall of this oppressive and mischievous policy, and in introducing a system of revenue which gives at least the public treasury, and through it the people at large, the benefits of what burdens we have to bear?

Why should you sit still and inactive, while questions concerning the National debt are agitated—questions which, by way of taxation, come home to you just as directly as to everybody else? I know efforts have been, and are being made, to enlist the interest of the Southern people in this matter, by persuading them that the repudiation, complete or partial, of the war debt of the United States, would be to their advantage. I entreat you, do not permit yourselves to be led astray by so fatal a delusion. The people of the United States will never disgrace themselves by repudiating any of their just obligations, and no political party will ever advocate such a measure without reducing itself at once to utter impotency. Believe me, when I say that the man who asks the Southern people to support this or that party, on a platform that has a grain of repudiation in it, simply invites you to join a funeral procession, and to resign your political influence for an indefinite period. And by repudiation, I do not mean only a downright refusal to pay what we owe, but any and all of those subterfuges by which the original understanding between the borrower and the lender is to be violated—that insane and dishonest proposition, for instance, which saw the light again in Ohio, to pay off the bonds with a new issue of greenbacks—to pay off an interest-bearing certificate of debt with other certificates of debt which bear no interest, the values of