Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/34

10 “masters” arrogating to themselves powers beyond the law.

This will be a difference no better—nay, rather somewhat worse—than that which a century and a quarter ago still existed between Englishmen of the first and Englishmen of the second class, the first represented by King George and the British Parliament, and the second by the American colonists. This difference called forth that great paean of human liberty, the American Declaration of Independence a document which, I regret to say, seems, owing to the intoxication of conquest, to have lost much of its charm among some of our fellow-citizens. Its fundamental principle was that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” We are now told that we have never fully lived up to that principle, and that, therefore, in our new policy we may cast it aside altogether. But I say to you that, if we are true believers in democratic government, it is our duty to move in the direction towards the full realization of that principle and not in the direction away from it. If you tell me that we cannot govern the people of those new possessions in accordance with that principle, then I answer that this is a reason why this democracy should not attempt to govern them at all.

If we do, we shall transform the government of the people, for the people and by the people, for which Abraham Lincoln lived, into a government of one part of the people, the strong, over another part, the weak. Such an abandonment of a fundamental principle as a permanent policy may at first seem to bear only upon more or less distant dependencies, but it can hardly fail in its ultimate effects to disturb the rule of the same principle in the conduct of democratic government at home. And I warn the American people that a democracy cannot so deny its faith as to the vital conditions of its