Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/367

Rh greatest and holiest and at the same time the most victorious of causes; and when our people labor in the sweat of their brow to pay the debt which the rebellion has loaded upon us, they do it with the proud consciousness that the heavy price they have paid is infinitely overbalanced by the value of the results they have gained: slavery abolished; the great American Republic purified of her foulest stain; the American people no longer a people of masters and slaves, but a people of equal citizens; the most dangerous element of disturbance and disintegration wiped out from among us; this country put upon the course of harmonious development, greater, more beautiful, mightier than ever in its self-conscious power. And thus, whatever losses, whatever sacrifices, whatever sufferings we may have endured, they appear before us in a blaze of glory.

But how do the Southern people stand there? All they have sacrificed, all they have lost, all the blood they have spilled, all the desolation of their homes, all the distress that stares them in the face, all the wreck and ruin they see around them, all for nothing, all for a wicked folly, all for a disastrous infatuation: the very graves of their dead nothing but monuments of a shadowy delusion; all their former hopes vanished forever; and the very magniloquence which some of their leaders are still indulging in, nothing but a mocking illustration of their utter discomfiture! Ah, sir, if ever human efforts broke down in irretrievable disaster, if ever human pride was humiliated to the dust, if ever human hopes were turned into despair, there you behold them.

You may say that they deserved it all. Yes, but surely, sir, you cannot say that the rebellion has gone entirely unpunished. Nor will the Senator from Indiana, with all his declamation, make any sane man believe that, had no political disabilities ever been imposed, the