Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/363

Rh to the catch-phrases of the demagogue, will understand it as a justification of all the things done to put down the negro and as an incitement to further steps along the same line.

And here is the crucial point: There will be a movement either in the direction of reducing the negro to a permanent condition of serfdom—the condition of the mere plantation hand, “alongside of the mule,” practically without any rights of citizenship—or a movement in the direction of recognizing ''him as a citizen in the true sense of the term. One or the'' other will prevail.

That there are in the South strenuous advocates of the establishment of some sort of semi-slavery cannot be denied. Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, is their representative and most logical statesman. His extreme utterances are greeted by many as the bugle-blasts of a great leader. We constantly read articles in Southern newspapers and reports of public speeches made by Southern men which bear a striking resemblance to the pro-slavery arguments I remember to have heard before the civil war, and they are brought forth with the same passionate heat and dogmatic assurance to which we were then accustomed—the same assertion of the negro's predestination for serfdom; the same certainty that he will not work without “physical compulsion”; the same contemptuous rejection of negro education as a thing that will only unfit him for work; the same prediction that the elevation of the negro will be the degradation of the whites; the same angry demand that any advocacy of the negro's rights should be put down in the South as an attack upon the safety of Southern society and as treason to the Southern cause. I invite those who indulge in that sort of speech to consider what the success of their endeavors would lead to.

In the first place, they should not forget that to keep a