Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/116

90 situation of the colored people has been seriously damaged by their false friends, and no device of legislation can furnish an adequate remedy. In this connection a word on the supplementary civil rights bill. That measure was brought forward and pressed by the dearest friend I ever had among the public men of America—a man whose memory I shall never cease to cherish and revere. This measure, however, I could not give my support. Nobody knows better than I do that it sprung from the purest motives, a rare sincerity of generous impulse and high patriotic aspirations. But it was based upon a theory of Constitutional power and upon views of policy upon which my friend and I had for years been agreed to disagree.

In a few words I will state my opinions on the bill. Those who have observed my utterances on questions of Constitutional power, such as were involved, for instance, in the Ku-Klux act, need not be told that I must consider the civil rights bill as transgressing the limits with which the Constitution hedges in the competency of the National Government, and as encroaching upon the sphere of State authority. I will not to-night tire you with a restatement of principles which I have frequently discussed.

But the civil rights bill, if made a law, would have other effects which its originator did certainly not design it to have—effects injuriously touching the interests of the colored people themselves. It has been said that the enactment of that bill would be calculated to break up the whole system of public schools in several of the Southern States. My observation and reflection convinces me that this apprehension is well grounded. And nobody would be a greater sufferer than the colored people; for nothing can be more important to them than that, issuing as they do from a state of degradation and ignorance, an efficient system of public instruction should put