Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/131



The speaker had been invited to St. Louis by the Emancipationists of that city. The Presidential campaign of 1860, with Mr. Lincoln as the candidate of the Republicans, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Breckinridge as the two rival candidates of the Democrats, and Mr. Bell as the candidate of the Constitutional Union party, had fairly begun, and the popular excitement was running high. The Anti-slavery movement had grown to imposing dimensions in the city of St. Louis, but still weak in the interior of the State. His speech was, in the first place, intended to aid the Emancipationists in electing their Congressional candidates, but the speaker availed himself of this opportunity to address a direct argument to the people of the Slave States.



To deny the existence of an evil they do not mean to remedy, to ascribe to paltry causes the origin of great problems they do not mean to solve, to charge those who define the nature of an existing difficulty with having originated it—these are expedients which the opponents of reformatory movements have resorted to since mankind has a history. An appeal to ignorance or timidity is their last hope, when all resources of logic and argument are exhausted. The old comedy is repeated again and again.

The assertions that the great contest between free and slave labor has no foundation in fact, that the origin of the slavery controversy is to be found in the fanaticism of a few Northern abolitionists, and that those who speak