Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/124

114 diency. Let them ask Mr. Douglas, from whose hands he wrested the popular majority in Illinois; let them ask those who once felt the magic touch of his lucid mind and honest heart; let his detractors ask their own secret misgivings, and in their own fears they will read the cause of the joy and assurance of his friends. [Applause.] They whistle in order to keep up their courage; but, methinks, it is a doleful sound. [Laughter and cheers.] So, then, we stand before the people, with the platform of free labor, and upon it a true representative of free labor as a candidate for the Presidency. On this attitude we challenge our enemies to the battle.

On our flank we are threatened by the Constitutional-Union Nondescript; by that party of dry hearts and dead weights, who recently assembled at Baltimore, and, conscious of their inability to make a platform, adopted a sentence from a Fourth of July oration as their common creed, and will in all probability circulate Mr. Everett's Mount Vernon papers as their principal campaign documents. [Great laughter and cheers.] They know no North, no South, no East, no West, no anything, and least of all they know themselves. [Laughter.] See them march on, ready to charge, but gently and with forbearance, lest they step upon somebody's toes [laughter], and slowly and noiselessly, lest their own soldiers, frightened by their own impetuosity, suspect themselves of sinister designs—for theirs is an army which, by the accidental explosion of a percussion cap, might be thrown into the most frightful disorder. [Great laughter and applause.] It is said that one of their candidates contemplates declining the nomination. Let him well ponder what he is doing. Let him not, with his accustomed rashness in political matters, skip over so awful a responsibility; upon his resolution, so or so, may depend a difference of