Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/32

22 plause.] It is the old mistake, the old confusion of ideas; there is nothing new in it but one feature, and that is its very worst.

It marks, indeed, a new period in the history of this country. All the compacts between freedom and slavery, struck by the fathers of this Republic and the subsequent generation of statesmen, were compromises between a principle and an interest. Endeavoring to reconcile the social institutions of this country with the fundamental ideas upon which this government was built, the fathers of this Republic labored for the gradual abolition of slavery wherever they could reach it. But, unable to extinguish it at once, they made concessions to slavery as to an unfortunately existing fact, without recognising in it any principle from which it might derive any national right. To them freedom was the ruling, the fundamental, the national principle, and slavery a local institution which existed only by sufferance, and to which concessions were made for the sake of temporary expediency. This spirit governed the councils of the nation in all acts relating to slavery, and Congress, therefore, did not hesitate to exclude from the national territories what it considered a nuisance. The manifest tendency was to remove the existing contradiction between the fundamental principles of our government and a social institution, by sacrificing the latter. [Cheers.]

Even the Missouri Compromise, so far as it excluded slavery from certain territories, was dictated by this spirit.

The Nebraska Bill, in opening the national territories to slavery, elevated slavery from the rank of a mere obnoxious fact to the rank of a national principle. According to that measure, slavery shall have the right to exist everywhere, by virtue of the national law, where it is not abolished and prohibited by local legislation. Before Mr.