Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/20

10 a simple term—the logic of things and events. It is the close connection between cause and effect, between principle and fact—a connection which cannot be severed, and the clear knowledge of which is the only safe foundation for political wisdom.

I have been taught by history that a democratic system of government, although it may overcome local and temporary inconveniences, cannot bear a direct contradiction between political principles on the one and social institutions on the other side. Such inconsistencies will and must bring forth questions and conflicts involving the very foundations of popular liberty. They may appear in different shapes, but when they have once taken possession of the political arena, they will overshadow all other issues. Everything else will be subordinate to them; they will form the only legitimate line of distinction between parties, and all attempts to divert public attention from them, or to palliate them with compromises or secondary issues, will prove futile and abortive. Their final decision, one way or the other, will decide the practical existence of a people.

Such a contradiction is that between liberty, founded upon the natural rights of man, and slavery, founded upon usurpation; between democracy, which is the life-element of our Federal Constitution, and privilege, which is the life-element of the slaveholding system and of Southern society.

I do not intend to make an anti-slavery speech in the common understanding of the term, dwelling at length upon the sufferings of the bondman and the cruelty of the master and the sinfulness of sin in general. My purpose is to investigate, from a political stand-point, the conflicts which, as natural consequences, must spring from the mixture of the contradictory principles of slavery and democracy.