Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/431

Rh which have already taken place will facilitate the formation of new groupings on questions of a National character, and that the South, at a day not very distant, will cease to figure as a “solid” quantity in our National elections.

But whether this takes place in four, or in eight, or in twelve years, no unprejudiced observer will fail to recognize the fact that the Rebellion is really over, and that those who still speak of the white people of the South as “unregenerated rebels, as disloyal and as bitter as ever,” betray either lamentable ignorance or something much worse.

I think it safe to affirm that to-day, twenty years after the close of the war, the Southern people are as loyal to the Union as the people of any part of the country, that they fully understand and profoundly feel the value of their being part of it, and that a disunion movement would find no more adherents in South Carolina than in Massachusetts. I think it also safe to say that, whatever atrocities may have happened during that terrible period of sudden transition from one social order to another, the relations between the white and black races are now in progress of peaceful and friendly adjustment, and that the disappearance of race antagonism on the political field will do more for the safety of the negro's rights and the improvement of his position in human society than could be done by any intervention of mere power.

If there are any dangerous political tendencies perceptible among the Southern people, they are not such as are frequently used as bugbears to frighten the loyal sentiment of the North, but rather lie in the opposite direction. There is no longer any danger of a stubborn adherence to State-rights doctrines of an anti-national character. The danger is rather in an inclination to look too much to the National Government for benefits to be