Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/111

Rh call away not only from Louisiana, but from South Carolina and all the Southern States, or to strip of their official power, the multitude of Federal officeholders, who have looked upon themselves as mere party agents, using all their influence to sustain and strengthen the bloodsuckers desolating that country, and probably not in many cases oblivious of their own profit. And I was sincerely rejoiced when a few days ago I read in the papers that the President was seriously thinking of holding a terrible muster of Federal placemen in the South. It is a timely resolution. Never was it more necessary. Let us hope that not a single one of those who have made the Federal authority a symbol of selfish partisan power and greedy oppression may escape him, and that the beginning be made with Packard and his associates, whose partisan appeals led the President to recognize the Kellogg government two years ago, and brought him into a position in which he now could not perform the duty of enforcing the Federal authority without at the same time sustaining a flagrant wrong.

But there the duty of the National Government does not end. It will not have been fully performed as long as the usurpation set on foot by a Federal Judge and supported by the Federal power is not undone. No longer than the period of its next meeting should the Congress of the United States permit any citizen of Louisiana to believe that the highest legislative power of the Republic can so far yield to partisan spirit as to sustain a palpable, an undoubted usurpation, even after that usurpation has most ignominiously demonstrated its inability to sustain itself. That duty remains unfulfilled until that precedent is wiped out, which is as dangerous as that of a successful revolution would have been; the precedent of a successful coup d'état, creating a State government and a legislature without the evidence