Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/366

342 the colored people generally. The reactionist wishes to keep the colored people, that is, the great mass of the laboring force in the South, as ignorant as possible, to the end of keeping it as submissive and obedient as possible. As formerly the people of the South were the slaves of slavery, so they are now to be made the victims of their failure to abolish slavery altogether.

And now imagine the moral, intellectual and economic condition of a community whose principal and most anxious—I might say hysteric—care is the solution of the paramount problem “how to keep the nigger down”—that is, to reduce a large part of its laboring population to stolid brutishness—and that community in competition with other communities all around which are energetically intent upon lifting up their laboring forces to the highest attainable degree of intelligence, ambition and efficiency.

This is not all. The reactionist fiercely insists that the South “must be let alone” in dealing with the negro. This was the cry of the pro-slavery men of the old ante bellum time. But the American people outside of the South took a lively interest in the matter, and finally the South was not left alone. If the reactionists should now succeed in reestablishing something like slavery in the shape of peonage or any other shape, they can hardly hope to be “let alone.” Although there is at present little inclination among the people of the North to meddle politically with Southern difficulties, they will hardly witness such a relapse into the vicious old system with indifference. They will hardly accept that doctrine of non-intervention which insists, as Abraham Lincoln expressed it, “that when A makes B his slave, C shall not interfere.” I think I risk little in predicting that the reactionists are in this respect preparing new trouble for the South, and that only their failure can prevent that trouble.