Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/417

Rh spirit working. Was that impression wrong? Consider impartially what reasons they had for it. While the most reckless and rapacious of political bloodsuckers were thus plundering those communities, a system of political disabilities was maintained which excluded a large number of the intelligent property-holding men from eligibility to office, and thus from active participation in the administration of public affairs; a large number of those who had the greatest stake in good government were thus told that it was no business of theirs. While in this way, on the one side, the work of the plunderers was facilitated, it was not wonderful that on the other the summons—you shall love this Government! did not meet with an enthusiastic response. The removal of political disabilities, although its good effect could not have been doubted, was studiously put off until it could no longer be denied, aye, until the Cincinnati Convention had shown that the question could be trifled with no longer; and when amnesty was granted, it was done with such useless restrictions and with such a grudging grace as to make it appear that those who gave it would much rather have withheld it. It was simply the first victory of the Cincinnati movement.

Look over the legislation of Congress touching the late insurrectionary States. Study it attentively,—the bayonet law, the Ku-Klux law, as they now present themselves in retrospective view. The ends that legislation was to reach were apparently good. Grave and most reprehensible disorders had occurred in the South. Voters had been terrorized in the exercise of their rights. Innocent and inoffensive persons had been cruelly persecuted, oppressed, maltreated, killed by organized bands of marauders. The laws I spoke of were ostensibly intended to protect the rights of citizens and to repress such disorder. Well-meaning persons, to whom, even when opposing the passage