Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/362

338 they are as much entitled to the right of suffrage as white men are. It has been suggested that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the National Constitution, embodying the provisions referred to, be done away with by further amendment; but leaving aside the question whether as a matter of right this should be done, I doubt whether a single well-informed man can be found in the country who thinks it possible that the required three-fourths of the States will ever consent to such a repeal. To discuss the visionary colonization scheme or the equally impossible repeal of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments means, therefore, not only to squander time and breath, but to divert the popular mind from the true problem and from the real possibilities of its solution. It must, to start with, be taken as a certainty that the negroes will stay here and that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments will stand, and if they are to be made inoperative at all, it must be by means of a sort of tricky stratagem in flagrant violation of the spirit of the Constitution. Such stratagems are usually not approved by conscientious persons and they cannot be resorted to by a people without a mischievous lowering of the standard of public morals and an impairment of self-respect.

This is evidently a political and social condition which cannot continue to exist without constant and most unwholesome irritation and restlessness. Such as it is, it cannot possibly be permanent. The colored people will be incessantly disturbed by the feeling that they are unjustly deprived of their legal rights and have become the victims of tyrannical oppression. The most thoughtful and self-respecting among the whites will be ashamed of that state of things, and dissatisfied with themselves for tolerating it. The reckless among the white population, the element most subject to the passions fomented and stirred by a race-antipathy, and most responsive