Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/169

Rh of the South if, after their unscrupulous leaders have done so much already to identify them with organized corruption and rapacity, you now, by employing or sanctioning unconstitutional means for their protection, identify them also with the overthrow of Constitutional principles and contempt for the laws of the land! Such measures to protect them will by their very effects put them in the greatest jeopardy. Their most cruel enemies could not inflict on them an injury more cruel than this.

Let me warn you, Senators, that you stand upon dangerous ground; for if such things as have been done in Louisiana are sustained by the Republican majority in Congress, and as one evil deed always gives birth to another, if so high-handed a course be continued, you are taking upon yourselves a responsibility the extent of which it is difficult to measure. Do not treat with contempt, I beseech you, what is now going on in the public mind. I hold here in my hand an extract which I clipped from one of the Republican papers of the North, and I will read to you its language:

Unless the Republican party is content to be swept out of existence by the storm of indignant protest arising against the wrongs of Louisiana from all portions of the country, it will see that this most shameful outrage is redressed wholly and at once; for if it is right for the Federal soldiery to pack the legislature of one State in the manner the Attorney-General declares it shall be packed, or if it can be done, it is right and can be done in any other State. It is a matter that concerns Massachusetts, California and Pennsylvania equally with Louisiana; for it is an act of Federal usurpation which, if not revoked and condemned by Congress, will lead inevitably to the destruction of the whole fabric of our government.

What adds to the common indignation against the perpetrators of the wrong is the moral heroism exhibited by the disfranchised people of Louisiana, who have borne with