Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/12

vi people long before the final struggle commenced. But although slavery was considered wrong, those who possessed no slaves soothed their consciences with the idea that the slaveholders alone were responsible for it; and although the theory of the antagonism between slavery and democratic institutions seemed incontrovertible in the abstract, it was thought that, in reality, slavery might without danger be permitted to continue along with the other institutions and interests of the country, if things were only managed with prudence and a conciliatory spirit. As it is usually the case where the masses have to act for themselves, it required the element of practical impulse to produce clear intellectual perceptions, and to develop these intellectual perceptions coupled with a moral principle, into a motive for immediate action. The practical relation between slavery and other political questions of general concern, had not sufficiently penetrated the popular mind. It had to make itself practically felt, in order to be clearly understood. The Kansas Nebraska Act, involving the whole of our national domain, and seriously threatening our future growth and prosperity, went far to supply the deficiency; but when the slave power baffled in its aspirations by the election of 1860, rose up in rebellion, and thus disclosed its thoroughly anti-national tendency, the whole truth revealed itself to the eyes of the people. Forthwith it became evident to every fair-minded man that the question of Union or Disunion, although brought forward under the guise of divergent Constitutional theories, was only a new form of the slavery question, but now a form which demanded an immediate, and, at the same