Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/135

Rh that were against you. The spirit of justice, and nothing else, made it possible for you to acquire the influence which you now possess. This is a matter of history.

I remind you of these things not in order to establish any personal claim on your gratitude. I have had too much experience in public life to ignore what such claims are worth, and on that score I hereby absolve every one of what, in a moment of sentimental emotion, he might have thought a personal obligation. But you cannot be absolved from your obligations to the welfare of the State.

I remind you of it for your own sakes, because it ought not to be lost sight of when you form your own opinion as to the attitude you should assume.

After all this has happened; after your former antagonists have given you the most conclusive proof, not only that they desired to bury forever all the animosities of the past, but also that they wanted you to enjoy all the rights and privileges they enjoyed, and that in no conceivable sense any discrimination should be made against you—after all this, and while there is not a Union man in Missouri who, in any competition of political or business life, attempts to make your position during the war a point against you—do you think it is quite right and quite wise that so many of you should make past service in the Union or the Confederate cause an issue against or for any man in private or political life? Is it quite right and wise, for instance, that your organs should excite prejudice and inflame animosity against such a man as Major Gentry, whom every one of you knows to be a gentleman of unspotted integrity, high character, an able mind and generous instincts, on the ground that as a Union man he performed the duties of an officer in a regiment of home guards? Is it quite right and wise, since the People's party have shown their spirit by nominating two