Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/117

Rh them on the road of progressive improvement. Anything injuriously affecting such a system must therefore be gravely injurious to them.

Now, it is a well-known fact that in the States containing the bulk of the colored population there existed, if not a general, still a widespread and powerful prejudice against the introduction of a system of common schools, to be supported at the public expense. We know something of that even in Missouri. That prejudice, although now overborne by a superior public opinion, is far from being entirely extinct. It requires only a new and strong impetus to impart to it new strength enough seriously to disturb what has with difficulty been built up.

It is equally well known that a large majority of the white people of those States, even a large majority of those who are sincerely anxious to secure to the colored children the largest possible advantages of education in separate establishments, still are very strongly, nay, violently, opposed to any law which, like the civil rights bill, would force the admission of colored children together with white children, in the same schoolrooms. That opposition exists, and we have to deal with it as a fact. Try to enforce, under such circumstances, the system of mixed schools, and what will be the result? The old prejudice against a system of public instruction to be supported by taxation, as it still exists in the States in question, will at once find itself powerfully reinforced, and to an attack so strengthened, against a defense in the same measure weakened, it is most probable that the systems of instruction, laboriously built up, will succumb. At any rate they will be interrupted for a disastrously long period.

There is scarcely a greater misfortune conceivable that could befall those communities. But what would especially the colored people have gained? Now they