Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/283

Rh upon the great outlet? Is not this as if some person were constitutionally permitted to have his grip upon your throat, able and ready, whenever he wants anything of you, to stop the circulation of your blood merely by squeezing a little? And this humiliating situation anybody expects our active, enterprising, spirited and brave people to endure? The discussion of this possibility would be a mere waste of words. The people of the United States have bought the mouth of the Mississippi, once with their money, and twice with their blood. [Great applause.] To give it away would be merely to produce the necessity of buying it a fourth time. Can the South yield it? No. Can the North do without it? No. And then?

I might go on to show how the proximity of dangerous neighbors immediately on our borders—of neighbors whose guns command our very capital, and who held the natural outlet of the most productive part of our country—would at once oblige us to be in constant readiness for attack and defence; how large standing armies would swallow up the financial resources we might otherwise devote to the payment of our national debt; how the first success of a secession movement would inevitably draw similar attempts at dismemberment after it; how the minds of the people would be continually agitated by conspiracies and treasonable enterprises; how all this would steadily undermine our liberal institutions by producing a centralization of power; how military necessity would become a standing and commanding element in our political life; and gradually transform the republic of peace into an engine of war; but it is enough.

It must be clear to every candid mind, that a settlement on the basis of disunion, far from securing a permanent peace, will be nothing but a mere temporary armistice, and must, after a short trial, produce the strengthened