Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/22

12 fight. There will be a struggle, and there must be a victory. [Applause.] Is this applicable to slavery and the slaveholders? A rapid glance at the political development of this country will answer that question.

In the slaveholding States all political life is shaped by the ruling interest. While the people of the South profess the principle of equality, one class of citizens is accustomed to rule, and the other to obey (mark, I am speaking of the whites, not of the slaves), and the whole machinery of government, even to the smallest functions, is in the hands or under the control of the slaveholding aristocracy. While they profess the principle of political liberty, you dare neither speak nor write a word against the peculiar institution. While they claim to be freemen, they have fettered the hands of the people with the most odious police regulations, dictated by the instinctive fears common to all tyrants. While they claim to be an enlightened people, they do not suffer the great leading ideas of the age to be taught in their schools and colleges, for fear they might engender a thought against slavery. While they claim to be a religious and moral people, they address even their prayers to no other God than the black God of slavery. While they pretend to be a patriotic people, they have sacrificed to slavery the liberties of speech and of the press; sacrificed even the liberty of conscience; sacrificed the welfare of the non-slaveholding whites; sacrificed the prosperity and prospects of their own States; sacrificed the peace of the Republic. [Applause.] And they will tell you as often as you want to hear it, that they stand ready to sacrifice to the preservation of slavery the Union of these States, and the last remnant of their liberties and republican institutions. Nobody can deny it, in the South slavery overrules everything else; slavery rules in all. [Applause.]