Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/329

Rh permitted the same rights and privileges as other people, that despised race, forming so infinitesimal a part of the world's population, will surely outwit us all, and rob us of our property, and possess themselves of all the controlling forces of society; and that, therefore, the Jews must be shackled hand and foot with all sorts of legal disabilities, if not exterminated, in order to save Christendom from ignominious enslavement.

Nothing could be more absurd and at the same time more cowardly than such reasoning and such appeals. But it is to agitations inflamed by just this spirit that we owe horrors like those of Kischinev, in beholding which humanity stands aghast. These horrors are only one more revelation of the ulterior tendency of a movement which here and there even assumes the mask of superior respectability. Here is the whole question again brought before the tribunal of the conscience of mankind. May this event serve to put in clearer light the fact that the history of the world exhibits no more monumental record of monstrous injustice than the persecutions inflicted upon the Jews during so many centuries. We may then also hope to see the other fact universally recognized that wherever the Jewish race, with its wonderful vitality and its remarkable productiveness of talent and energy, enjoys the equal protection of just laws and a due appreciation of its self-respect, it will, far from remaining a race of aliens, furnish its full contingent of law-abiding, peaceable, industrious, public-spirited and patriotic citizenship, vying with the best. 



I thank you for the copy of Mr. Pulitzer's “Appreciation and Apology” which you have been so kind as to send