Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/25

Rh make you believe, make all States slave or free by force of arms; but we must either abandon the principle of equal rights, even among white men, and adapt the whole development of our political organization to the paramount interests of a privileged class of slaveholders; put the liberties of speech and press at the mercy of the ruling power, and sacrifice our democratic system of government to the aristocratic and despotic tendencies of the slaveholding system throughout, or we must break the political power of slavery in our national concerns, and return to the original principles on which this Republic was founded. In one word, we must formally recognize slavery as the ruling interest in our national policy, or we must deny it the recognition of any national right, and confine it to a merely local existence under positive State legislation. [Cheers.] This is the alternative.

Now, quibble as you will; devise side issues and subterfuges; invent palliative remedies; delude others and delude yourselves with fictitious compromises: this alternative will again and again push away all your plausibilities and sophistries, and say to you with the stern voice of inexorable fate: “Here am I!  You have not seen me, perhaps, but here I am.” [Cheers.]

And now, there comes a man, like Mr. Douglas, who ought to understand the signs of the times, and gives it as his opinion that slavery and democracy, having lived side by side these eighty years, may live on thus, and he does not see the incompatibility. Indeed! he does not see it! The same man, who once, in the name of the slaveholders, cried out to the champions of freedom in the Senate: “We will subdue you.” He does not see that somebody and something must be subdued! [Applause.] A blind man does not see the sun, and yet it shines. A deaf man does not hear the thunder of heaven, and yet he will feel the