Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/34

24 hills of free New York, the other from the miry soil of a South Carolina cotton-field. The antagonism between liberty and slavery has drawn in its whirl the current of human thought and the reasoning faculties of the human mind. But is such is the case even with the Federal Constitution, of which Madison said, that it should contain nothing which might remind coming generations that such an abomination as slavery ever existed in this Republic, what will be the fate of such measures, as are nothing but an embodiment of the old contradiction and antagonism between democracy and slavery? As soon as such a measure is enacted, both principles and both sections of the country representing them, will seize upon it and try to monopolize its construction, and what is construed to mean liberty here, will be construed to mean slavery there; and this is natural, for to the slaveholder the principal meaning of liberty is that man shall have the right to hold his fellow-man as property. [Cheers.]

Was it not so with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill? No sooner was that measure passed by Congress than the slaveholding interest succeeded in monopolizing its construction, and while our poor democrats in the Northern States were descanting on the beauties of territorial self-government, the South put down squatter sovereignty with a sneer, and all that remained of the “great principle” was, that the slaveholders acquired the absolute right to hold their slaves as property in all the territories of the United States “by virtue of the Federal Constitution.” [Cheers.] What means the Nebraska Bill now? Ah, look at Mr. Douglas himself, how he is fluttering between the Northern and Southern construction of his “great principle;” how that happy father is hardly able to tell his own child, which is white to-day and black to-morrow [great laughter and applause]; how he bows to the Dred