Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/434

400 held together, not by force of arms, but by a common national pride and common interests and hopes and aspirations. The more earnest he was as an enemy of slavery, the more he will rejoice to find the rights of the freedman secured by his friendly relations with his white neighbors. Instead of eagerly seizing upon every chance for sowing suspicion and bitterness between the North and the South, he will hail with gladness all evidences of returned fraternal feeling, and he will not be ashamed to own that even those who during the war stood against him as enemies, had, as fellow-citizens, his sympathy in the calamities they had brought upon themselves, and that his heartiest wishes are with them for the success of every honorable effort to repair their fortunes and to resume their places in the citizenship of this Republic. 



Your letter dated on the 22d. inst. reached me only this afternoon. Can there be a mistake in the date?

I hear the growl of the impatient editor, and I appreciate his feelings, too. The present situation of the matter is this: I am pretty well advanced in the biography and hard at work on it. Most of the material I have in hand. Barring accident, I hope to get the book [Henry Clay] done by October—that is to say, I deem it probable that I shall. I might rush it through, but that, I am sure, you do not want me to do. All I can say is that I shall do my utmost to finish it by that time. The book would have been finished long ago had I not been interrupted by calls upon my time of various kinds, which I could not possibly disregard. Even now I am working under some strain,