Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/432

398 conferred upon the people of the Southern States—an inclination cropping out in a variety of ways of far greater practical significance than mere discussions on theories of government. Neither is there any danger that in consequence of the Democratic victory in the National election the negro will be deprived of his right to vote; the danger is rather that, as the Democrats divide among themselves, the negro will be drawn to the polls and made to vote more than he otherwise would, by demoralizing inducements.

It is also to be apprehended that large numbers of people in the South, under the influence of their struggle with poverty or with chronic embarrassments, will long be subject to those delusions on economic questions which are at the bottom of the fiat-money idea and the silver movement, and that, as they see a prospect for an industrial development in the South, extreme protection theories may grow strong there by the time the North is through with them. But these things are not peculiar to the South. There is nothing of a “peculiar institution,” of a “Southern policy” in them. A “friend of silver” in Texas cannot possibly be hotter than a “friend of silver” in Colorado. The fiat-money man in Mississippi borrows his arguments from the fiat-money man in Ohio; and the free-trader in South Carolina or the protectionist in northern Alabama is substantially of the same mind with the free-trader in Minnesota or the protectionist in Pennsylvania. There is no longer any division of political aims and motives marked by Mason and Dixon's line. The errors which the Southern people are liable to commit with regard to all these things may be grievous enough, but they will not be peculiarly Southern errors; and in the eyes of sensible men they will not furnish even a plausible pretext for keeping alive sectional suspicions and animosities.