Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/274

264 ment of things presses on, and the day of the final decision draws nearer every hour. Americans, I have spoken to you the plain, cold language of fact and reason. I have not endeavored to capture your hearts with passionate appeals, nor your senses with the melody of sonorous periods. I did not desire to rush you on to hasty conclusions; for what you resolve upon with coolness and moderation, you will carry out with firmness and courage. And yet it is difficult for a man of heart to preserve that coolness and moderation when looking at the position this proud nation is at present occupying before the world; when I hear in this great crisis the miserable cant of party; when I see small politicians busy to gain a point on their opponents; when I see great men in fluttering trepidation lest they spoil their record, or lose their little capital of consistency. [Cheering.]

What! you, the descendants of those men of iron who preferred a life-or-death struggle with misery on the bleak and wintry coast of New England to submission to priestcraft and kingcraft; you, the offspring of those hardy pioneers who set their faces against all the dangers and difficulties that surround the early settler's life; you, who subdued the forces of wild nature, cleared away the primeval forest, covered the endless prairie with human habitations; you, this race of bold reformers who blended together the most incongruous elements of birth and creed, who built up a Government which you called a Model Republic, and undertook to show mankind how to be free; you, the mighty nation of the West, that presumes to defy the world in arms, and to subject a hemisphere to its sovereign dictation; you, who boast of recoiling from no enterprise ever so great, and no problem ever so fearful—the spectral monster of slavery stares you in the face, and now your blood runs cold, and all your