Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/400

374 citizens to put aside all narrow views of party interest and to coöperate with you in this great task. This passage may contain also a reference to the platforms of both parties in which the necessity of reform is strongly recognized and certain propositions urged. As both parties should be assumed to have spoken in good faith, they must be taken at their word and are in duty and honor bound to give the President their coöperation.

Next the Southern question. Here again your letter of acceptance would be the best text. Elaborating the ideas contained therein, you might allude to the inevitable confusion and perplexities which could not but follow a great civil war, and especially a sweeping revolution of the whole labor system of a country; the moral obligation of the National Government to fix the rights of the emancipated slaves and to protect them in the enjoyment of those rights; setting forth that the Southern people, as honorable men, would have done the same thing, had they been in our situation; that the abuses and misgovernment in some States, which followed the enfranchisement of the late slaves (a class of people without their fault ignorant and untutored and liable to be misled), were to a great extent not unnatural; that, notwithstanding all this, the colored people are entitled to the sympathy, not only of those who liberated them, but also of their late masters; that the outrages here and there committed upon them, and the attempts to govern them by force, must be condemned by all good citizens; that the evil of misgovernment, the existence of which you frankly and fully recognize, must be averted by the harmonious efforts of all good men; that as these evils have been aggravated by an unruly and grasping party spirit, that party spirit should be as much as possible done away with in dealing with this problem; that, while in duty bound and fully determined to protect the