Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/117

Rh which rose up against the spread of slavery. This gave it its title of the party of freedom and of moral ideas. It conducted the Government during the war for the Union, and under its auspices the life of the Nation was saved. This made it in its time preeminently the party of National patriotism. Its aims were simple, clear and noble; its spirit that of patriotic devotion. But when its first great ends had been achieved, the civil war was ended, and the work of reconstruction begun, then the lust of power crept into its councils. While the life of the Union was still hanging in the balance of battle, the Republicans had felt, not unnaturally, that the ascendancy of the Republican party was necessary to the salvation of the Republic, and that, in maintaining that ascendancy, the end would justify the means. This belief became so firmly rooted in the minds of multitudes of Republicans that, even when the vital crisis was over, they continued to look upon any attempt to deprive the Republican Party of power as a heinous offense little short of treason; and they sanctioned even the most arbitrary measures adopted at that period to keep the late rebel States under Republican rule as measures absolutely required for the protection of the liberated slave and the preservation of the Union.

But the prejudices and passions of the civil war could not remain alive forever to demonstrate the necessity of Republican ascendancy. People would at last begin to think that the anti-slavery and Union-saving mission of the Republican Party was really fulfilled. Then the tariff question was advanced to the foreground. By the exigencies of the war, shrewdly taken advantage of by protectionists, the Republican Party had been drawn into a protective policy. The protective tariff, however, had at first been presented only as a “war measure,” as a “temporary necessity.” And after the war the continuation of the protective system had been advocated in a