Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/353

Rh practices and downright robberies perpetrated under those governments.

That the Southern whites, especially those who had any material stake in their communities, should not have been willing long to tolerate such shameful and ruinous misrule, is not at all surprising. But that statesmen of good character and high position in the National Government should have been willing systematically to sustain that misrule, is a fact which the historian will find it difficult to explain, unless he accepts the theory that selfish party spirit will sometimes seduce public men in approving, or even doing, on the political field, things from which they would shrink with disgust in private life. It is true that the opposition to the carpet-bag governments in the South took a lawless character and brought forth a large number of bloody outrages. But while duly striving to repress those outrages, the Administration and the Republican majority in Congress should not have forgotten that the provocation for the violent opposition to carpet-bag misrule was such as would hardly have been withstood by any spirited people on earth, and that the disorder could not possibly be allayed so long as that rapacious misrule continued by its excesses to provoke it. But party spirit did seem to forget this. Expecting to keep the Southern States under Republican control and thus to fortify the Republican majorities in Congress and in the Electoral College, the party leaders in power insisted upon supporting the carpet-bag governments, even by military interference, to an extent now hardly credible, and upon continuing the system of political disabilities by which those who had occupied certain positions under the Confederate Government were excluded from the suffrage as well as from eligibility to office, while the negro was endowed with the ballot and made eligible to political positions. It is hardly necessary to say to-day that the true policy in the