Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/368

344 sentence was passed by a Southern judge in language the dignity and moral feeling of which could hardly have been more elevated, and that the exposure of those crimes evoked among the people of the South many demonstrations of righteous wrath at such villainies—all these things and others of the same kind are symptoms of moral forces at work which, if well organized and directed, will be strong enough effectually to curb the reactionary spirit, and gradually to establish in the South, with regard to the negro problem, an order of things founded on right and justice, delivering Southern society of the constant irritations and alarms springing from wrongful and untenable conditions, giving it a much needed rest in the assurances of righteousness and animating it with a new spirit of progress.

No doubt the most essential work will have to be done in and by the South itself. And it can be. There are in the South a great many enlightened and high-minded men and women eminently fit for it. Let them get together and organize for the task of preparing the public mind in the South by a systematic campaign of education, for a solution of the problem in harmony with our free institutions. It may be a long and arduous campaign for them, but certainly a patriotic, meritorious and hopeful one. They will have to fight traditional notions and prejudices of extraordinary stubbornness, but they will also have generous impulses and sound common-sense to appeal to. They will not indulge in the delusion that they can ignore or altogether obliterate the existing race-antipathy, but they can effectively combat every effort to cultivate and inflame it. They will be able to show that it is the interest of the South, as it is that of the North, not to degrade the laboring force, but to elevate it by making it more intelligent and capable, and that if we mean thus to elevate it and to make it more efficient, we