Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/139

Rh abstract right to go with our slave property into the Territories, if you pass laws which attract to the Territories a class of population that will crowd out slavery; if you attract to them the foreign immigrant by granting him the immediate enjoyment of political rights; if you allure the paupers from all parts of the globe by your pre-emption laws and homestead bills? We want the negro in the Territories. You give us the foreign immigrant. Slavery cannot exist except with the system of large farms, and your homestead bills establish the system of small farms, with which free labor is inseparably connected. We are therefore obliged to demand that all such mischievous projects be abandoned.” Nothing more plausible. Hence the right of the laboring man to acquire property in the soil by his labor is denied, your homestead bills voted down, the blight of oppressive speculation fastened on your virgin soil, and attempts are made to deprive the foreign immigrant in the Territories of the immediate enjoyment of political rights, which, in the primitive state of social organization, are essential to his existence. All this in order to give slavery a chance to obtain possession of our national domain. This may seem rather hard. But can you deny that slavery, for its own protection, needs power in the General Government? that it cannot obtain that power except by increased representation? that it cannot increase its representation except by conquest and extension over the Territories? and that with this policy all measures are incompatible which bid fair to place the Territories into the hands of free labor?

This is not all. Listen to the slaveholder once more: “Our States,” he tells us, “are essentially agricultural, producing States. We have but little commerce, and still less manufacturing industry. All legislation tending to benefit the commercial and manufacturing interests, prin-