Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/319

Rh future of independence, self-reliance, and self-respect, will make them forget the past, in which there was nothing but degradation. Nor is this all.

The downfall of slavery will open the road to property to the poor labering man. Slavery was a huge insatiable land-eater. Slavery abolished, the great landed estates, based upon and supported by slave labor, will go to pieces, and the pieces will fall into the hands of the poor laboring man. Instead of the grand palatial mansion, surrounded with miserable negro cabins, and instead of the wretched hovel inhabited by the poor white, we shall soon see the neat white cottage in the midst of small but flourishing fields, and the interior of that cottage will be adorned not with the bowie-knife and pistol, but with the book-case and every evidence of progressive civilization. This will go quickly as thought, for the Southern people will not be left to work out that development alone. Thousands and thousands of Northern men, who but recently had been roaming over that country with sword and bayonet, and on that occasion had made the discovery of the South, will invade it again with spade and plough, and machinery, and capital, and knowledge, and a spirit of progressive improvement. These invaders will be the peaceable neighbors of the invaded, and each one will work for the other in working for himself; and all will be one people. Thus the Southern people will be reorganized, regenerated by the emancipation of the large majority from the rule of a powerful few. Then the acrimony of the rebellion will be blotted out even to the remembrance; the people will no longer have time to think of the differences of an unfortunate past, for they will have to think of the problems of a busy present and a hopeful future. [Cheers.]

But what of the late slave-lord? Will he forget his rancor also? What if he does not? His class was always weak in numbers, and the system which made it powerful