Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/114

88 law; and the charge of that Kentucky judge, who tells his grand jury that if they fail to indict, not only the man who committed a murder, but also the sheriff who wilfully neglected to arrest that murderer, he will find grand jurymen in another county who will do their duty. In that spirit, which will relentlessly pursue the lawless elements of society as the common enemy, there is salvation for the Southern people. Let that spirit prevail in the South, and no partisanship in the North will be strong enough to baffle the sympathy which their misfortunes deserve. The South will again enjoy the largest Constitutional measure of self-government, and one of the greatest of those dangers will disappear which at present threaten the most vital part of our republican institutions.

The strongest ground upon which the men, whose rapacity has been so terrible a curse to the South, have their claim on public sympathy, is that they are the protectors of the colored people. Dreadful indeed would be the fate of the negro, were the protection of thieves their only safety. When we contemplate the part the colored people have played in the recent history of the Southern States, we find them rather to be pitied than to be condemned. That they should have fallen under the control of reckless and designing men, when, ignorant as centuries of slavery had left them, they entered upon the exercise of political rights, is by no means astonishing, especially when we consider that the Southern whites, their late masters, at first maintained an attitude of hostility to their new rights, while some of those designing friends appeared in the character of Federal officeholders, a character carrying with it an authority which the colored people were wont to look upon as the very source of their liberty. Neither is it surprising that the bad example of such leaders should have had a corrupting influence upon so impressionable a class of followers.