Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/168

142 but then you might have had Republican government in those States!

I ask you in all candor, Republican Senators, is that what you want? If you do, I am sure the patriotism of the American people is not with you.

O, it is indeed time we should understand that in this Republic we cannot serve the cause of law and order if we in our representative place do not respect the law and if we permit the Government to violate it without hindrance. Every lawless act of those in power, professedly intended to preserve peace and order, will most surely produce to the cause of peace and order its greatest danger. You want all the people of the South, and especially of Louisiana, to become law-abiding citizens; and yet, to make them so, the National authority has imposed upon them a government which is the offspring confessedly of gross judicial usurpation and revolutionary proceedings. How can you expect them to refrain from revolutionary acts after the Government itself has set them this revolutionary example? How can you fill them with reverence for the sanctity of the laws, if you show them that the laws have no sanctity for you?

The people of the South are not a people of murderers and banditti. Only the most morbid fanaticism of partisanship will call them so. There are, I know, bad elements among them, and you blame the better classes of society for not putting down these bad elements by their own efforts. But is not the National Government itself, by resorting to usurpation and unconstitutional proceedings, giving to those bad elements in Southern society a strength which otherwise they never would possess, enabling even the ruffian to throw himself into the attitude of a defender of Constitutional government against revolutionary usurpation?

You speak of protecting the negro. Woe to the negroes