Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/369

Rh amendment he has proposed cannot secure the necessary two-thirds vote in at least one of the houses of Congress, and that therefore it will be calculated to involve this measure also in the danger of common failure.

I repeat, it is not merely for the rebels I plead; it is for the whole American people, for there is not a citizen in the land whose true interests, rightly understood, are not largely concerned in every measure affecting the peace and welfare of any State of this Union.

Believe me, Senators, the statesmanship which this period of our history demands, is not exhausted by high-sounding declamation about the greatness of the crime of rebellion, and fearful predictions as to what is going to happen unless the rebels are punished with sufficient severity. We have heard so much of this from some gentlemen, and so little else, that the inquiry naturally suggests itself, whether this is the whole compass, the be-all and the end-all, of their political wisdom and their political virtue; whether it is really their opinion that the people of the South may be plundered with impunity by rascals in power; that the substance of those States may be wasted; that their credit may be ruined; that their prosperity may be blighted; that their future may be blasted; that the poison of bad feeling may still be kept working where we might do something to assuage its effects; that the people may lose more and more their faith in the efficiency of self-government and of republican institutions; that all this may happen, and we look on complacently, if we can only continue to keep a thorn in the side of our late enemies, and to demonstrate again and again, as the Senator from Indiana has it, our disapprobation of the crime of rebellion?

Sir, such appeals as these, which we have heard here so frequently, may be well apt to tickle the ear of an unthinking multitude. But unless I am grievously in