Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/128

102 of the State under your rule, when the newspapers of the country East and West, as well as our own, are alive with accounts of highway robbery and murder in Missouri, which the government showed itself utterly impotent to repress and punish?

And here you will pardon me for taking notice of that somewhat amusing attempt made recently by partisan papers to charge me with defaming the State, and frightening away immigration, because I had in public speech called those occurrences disgraceful to Missouri, and had demanded that the people give themselves a government which will honestly and rigorously enforce the laws. I have been accused of having called Missouri the “robber State.” I have to pronounce that utterly false. What I did say is this: The good citizens of Missouri have risen up to demand “that the scandalous and alarming brigandage and ruffianism which so long a time have been permitted to disgrace the fair name of this State shall at last be rooted out by the strong hand of power honestly wielded; that the farmer shall feel safe in the solitude of his forest or prairie home, and that the traveller on every high- and by-way of the State shall be without fear of assault and robbery; that the laws be enforced rigorously and impartially, without regard to person, to local prejudice or feeling, or to political influence—enforced not only in hollow profession but in honest fact.” That is what I said, and that is all; and therefore a defamer of the State! Ah, it is rather a stale trick of demagogism to accuse those who denounce existing evils, and insist upon redress, of defaming the Commonwealth—a stale trick, I say, as old as demagogism itself. Already the Greeks and Romans knew it and buried it under contemptuous ridicule. What we see now is only a feeble posthumous imitation.

Why did you not tell us in 1870 not to expose the wrongs of disfranchisement lest we defame the State and