Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/364

340 race in slavery that had been in that condition for many generations, as was done before the civil war, is one thing, comparatively easy; but that to reduce that race again to slavery, or something like it, after it has been free for half a century, is quite another thing—nobody knows how difficult and dangerous.

In the second place, they should not forget that the slavery question of old was not merely one of morals and human rights, but that it had a most important bearing upon the character of democratic government as well as upon economic interests and general progress and prosperity. Some of us remember vividly how, in ante bellum days, the Southern people smarted under the feeling of their commercial and industrial inferiority to the North; how they held conventions and conferences to consult about the means by which they might be relieved of their “abject and disgraceful dependence”—about factories to be built on Southern soil, about commercial connections to be established with the outside world, about steamships to run between Southern ports and those of foreign countries, and so on, and how, in spite of all those schemes and spasmodic efforts, the inferiority of the South remained substantially the same. The main reason of the failure was that the Southern people would not touch the principal cause of their inferiority. Above all else they idolized and cared for their “peculiar institution” of slavery. They were nervously anxious to avoid doing or even saying anything that might directly or indirectly endanger that “peculiar institution,” and it was this nervous anxiety which made them suspicious of every new idea or aspiration that might in some direct or indirect way have shaken the social and political order based upon slavery—especially suspicious of anything apt, directly or indirectly, to make the laboring force of the country more intelligent and thereby more ambitious. Nothing can have a more