Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/334

310 me of your action on various subjects with regard to which my sympathies have always been, and are now, in point of principle on your side. You are undoubtedly right in saying that the race question in its various phases and effects presents a much more bewildering puzzle than the question of capital and labor—perplexing as that is—because matters of mere interest are accessible to reason and argument, while matters of feeling inflamed by prejudice usually are not. Therefore I deem it so important that the campaign of education against race-antagonism in the South should in the main be undertaken and carried on by Southern men and women who would at once disarm the charge of “foreign” interference with home conditions which will always confront Northern advisers. The deplorable excitement called forth by your comparatively scanty appointments of colored persons in the South is only an exhibition of the unreasonableness and injustice of the race-prejudice and of the spasmodic character of its eruptions, which we have to bear with patience in the hope that gradually the Southern mind may be made to open itself to a perception of the utter absurdity and banefulness of its racial hysterics.

In your letter you refer to the fact that you have occasionally taken the advice of Booker Washington about the appointment to office of colored persons. Pardon me for remarking that, when I found at the time mention of this fact in the newspapers, it caused me some anxiety—not as if I had feared that his advice might not be candid and wise, which it undoubtedly was, but because I thought that Booker Washington was so peculiarly valuable a man and his mission so important and at the same time so delicate that he should most carefully be kept free of all contact with politics—especially that part of politics which has to do with patronage. Do you not think so?

Let me add that, in memory of old times, it does me