Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/392

382 reasoning of your minds. No, placing myself upon the identical ground which you yourselves for years have been in the habit of occupying, I have argued with you in the plain, dry, cold language of common sense. I have endeavored to prove to you, not what would be patriotic, exalted and noble, but simply what would be useful; I have appealed only to the instincts of your selfishness; and now does not your practical sense tell you that in every word I said I was right? If you are honest to yourselves you cannot deny it.

But I feel almost ashamed of having addressed such arguments to you; I feel as if I had to beg your pardon for it—for is it not humiliating that, in a crisis so solemn, so big with portentous decisions, we should, in order to reach the minds of a large number of American citizens, have to descend to a strain of reasoning so low? Is it not humiliating, that at a moment when interests so vast, principles so grand are at stake—when the whole future of the Republic, nay, the whole credit of the republican system of government trembles in the scale, we should be obliged to reply to the miserable rant and cant of disappointed party ambition? Do you not feel it to be a sad thing that, in such an hour, we should, in order to make an impression upon Americans, have to lower ourselves so far as to argue upon the assumed ground, that the brothers and parents and children of men who are fighting for this Republic on the battlefield can be held as property by the enemies of the Republic? May the genius of liberty forgive me for having done so, a single moment, only for argument's sake! Indeed, my friends, if there is one thing for which this nation would have a reason to be ashamed in all future time, it is, that it should have required the plea of necessity to justify a great reform which was dictated by the eternal laws of justice, and which ought to have been accomplished by the moral