Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/292

282 and machinery, and other things handy to have: how those ships would fly out again loaded with cotton; how, upon the value of that cotton, the Confederate loan would find new buyers, and their wretched finances would look up; how the whole fighting capacity of the South would receive a new and tremendous impulse. I might describe all that, but I will forbear.

There are two measures, which, in case of their accession to power, the Chicago party would most certainly execute. Victims to that most ridiculous of all mental diseases, the negrophobia, they would dismiss our two hundred thousand negro soldiers; and yielding to that most pernicious of all passions, demagogism, they would give up the idea of a conscription. Would they not? I dare any one of their public men, I dare their candidate, I dare the most bellicose of their partisans—I dare them to say that they will not do so. And the consequences? With one hand they will deplete and weaken the army, and with the other they will throw away the means of filling it up and strengthening it. Take two hundred thousand negro soldiers from the garrisons and posts they are guarding, take two hundred thousand white soldiers from Atlanta and Petersburg to fill the places left vacant by the negroes, and I call upon any military authority in this country to say: Will it, or will it not, he impossible for our two great armies, under Grant and Sherman, to hold the field?

“Retreat! retreat!” would be the cry; and it is, perhaps, with a view to this contingency that the Chicago Convention has selected its distinguished candidate. [Long-continued applause.] Do not speak of rapidly filling the vacuum with new recruits; for you give up the conscription, and I apprehend your friends in Indiana and Illinois and Ohio, your Sons of Liberty, and American Knights, will be rather slow to rush to the field with