Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/331



The meeting at which this speech was delivered was one of the great and brilliant campaign meetings arranged by the Union men of Brooklyn. The reader will remember that, although nothing was said about slavery in the Democratic platform of 1864, Democratic papers and orators were in the habit of accusing the administration of Mr. Lincoln and the Union party of carrying on the war exclusively for the benefit of the negro, and of having thus diverted the war from its original and legitimate object. This circumstance induced the speaker to adopt the line of argument followed in this speech.



To ascribe great effects to small, far-fetched, and merely incidental causes, is a manner of explaining historical events which weak minds pass off, and weaker minds take, as an evidence of superior sagacity. Even in those cases where individuals are powerful enough to produce great commotions on their own private motives, such an historical theory is but rarely admissible; but where a nation acts upon the impulses of the popular heart, it is never so. There are those who find the cause of the downfall of the Roman Republic in the financial embarrassments of some of her ambitious men. There are those who find the origin of the great religious Reformation of the sixteenth century in the desire of some German ecclesiastics