Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/401

Rh rights of all by the employment of every Constitutional power at your disposal, you are sincerely anxious to use every legitimate influence of the Administration in favor of honest government in the Southern States, and thus to promote their prosperity and contentment. And as in this you will not be influenced by partisan feeling, so you call upon all good citizens in the South to cast aside the prejudice of race and party and to coöperate with you in protecting the rights and promoting the interests of all. I need not say that, in my opinion, this and the foregoing paragraph will be the most important in the inaugural as to their effect.

Then, I think, something should be said of your determination to conduct the Executive branch of the Government with the strictest regard for the spirit as well as the forms of the Constitution.

Then a few sentences referring to our foreign relations would be in order; to the international complications threatening the peace of Europe, while we maintain friendly intercourse with all the nations and powers of the world; to our wise traditional policy of non-interference and honorable neutrality; to our disposition and hope, if unhappily any question of difference should arise between the United States and any foreign Governments, to settle them in the same amicable way in which we composed our disputes with Great Britain; and your earnest desire to secure to this Republic the blessings of peace and good understanding with all peoples and powers.

Finally, you might wind up with a reference to your one-term declaration, expressing your purpose and hope to make that one term as fruitful as possible to the American people.

This I would suggest as a rough outline of the points without any one of which, as I think, your inaugural would not be complete. You have probably thought of