Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/148

138 The next party that claims our attention is the so-called Democracy. As it is my object to discuss the practical, not the constitutional, merits of the problem before us, I might pass over the divisions existing in that organization. In fact, the point that separates Mr. Douglas from Mr. Breckenridge is but a mere quibble, a mere matter of etiquette. Mr. Douglas is unwilling to admit in words what he has a hundred times admitted in fact—for, can you tell me what practical difference in the world there is between direct and indirect intervention by Congress in favor of slavery, and that kind of non-intervention by Congress which merely consists in making room for direct intervention by the Supreme Court? And besides, in nearly all practical measures of policy, Mr. Douglas is regularly to be found on the side of the extreme South. Like that great statesman of yours (I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for alluding to him in decent political company), he always votes against measures for the encouragement of home industry, perhaps because he does not understand them. [Laughter.] He is one of the firmest supporters of the ascendency of the planters' interests in our economic questions, and, as to the extension of slavery by conquest and annexation, the wildest filibusters may always count upon his tenderest sympathies.

So I say I might have ignored him, if he had not succeeded in creating the most deafening of noises with the hollowest of drums. [Loud cheers.]

He proposes to “repress the irrepressible conflict” with what he emphatically styles “his great principle.” At first, he defined it as “self-government of the people in the Territories;” but it soon became apparent that under his great principle the people of the Territories were governed by anybody but self, and he called it “popular sovereignty.” It soon turned out that this