Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/155

Rh vigorous execution of Constitutional and just laws; and you will not understand me as thus designating all the laws that were made; but it did preclude the employment of the powers conferred by such laws for purposes of a partisan color calculated to impeach the impartiality of the National Government and thus to injure its moral authority. It did preclude, above all things, every unconstitutional stretch of interference, which by its insidious example is always calculated to encourage and excite a lawless and revolutionary spirit among all classes of society. That policy required that the National Government in all its branches should have sternly discountenanced the adventurers and bloodsuckers who preyed upon the Southern people, so as not to appear as their ally and protector. It required a conscientious employment of all those moral influences which the National Government had at its command. It was natural, in the distress and confusion which followed the war, that the Southern people, white as well as black, should have turned their eyes to the National Government for aid and guidance; and that aid and guidance might have been given, not in impeding and baffling, but in encouraging self-government to fulfil its highest aims and duties. Every Federal office in the South should have been carefully filled with the very wisest and the very best man that could be discovered for it. Nowhere in the vast boundaries of this Republic was the personal character of the Federal officer of higher importance, for being clothed by his very connection with the National Government with extraordinary moral authority, every one of them could without undue interference with local concerns, by the very power of his advice and example, make that moral influence most beneficially felt among all his surroundings.

Sir, I am not sanguine enough to believe that if such a policy had been followed local self-government would