Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/44

34 a hopeless minority. Here is strife and disappointment—there is peace and prosperity; choose. [Cheers.]

Do you not think that such words will be apt to make them stop and consider; such words accompanied, perhaps, by the sullen thunder of an earthquake beneath their very feet? They will certainly not abolish slavery at once. They will not suddenly cast off that singular chain of ideas which has bound them to the old order of things. for, do not forget that interest is with them not the only, and, perhaps, not even the most powerful, advocate of slavery. It cannot have escaped you that the slavery question is with them a question of aristocratic pride; that they look down upon the plebeians of the North with a certain contempt, and want to rule the government of their States and the Federal Government also, not as mere citizens, but as slaveholders. It is the pride of an aristocracy, the ambition of a caste. Against these, mere argument is no available weapon. Vain pride and ambition are fed and grow upon concessions, and there is nothing that will disarm them but the evident impossibility of their gratification. When slaveholders see their aristocratic pretensions put down by firm majorities, and when they can no longer escape the conviction, that their aspirations to rule the country as slaveholders meet with universal contempt, they will be more apt to listen to the voice of reason, which, at the same time, is the voice of their true interest. After the blinding influence of those ruling passions has been paralyzed by irrevocable events, then, and not till then, will the true moral and economical merits of slavery be fairly investigated and thoroughly understood in the slaveholding States. Discovering that they are an isolated anomaly in the wide world, the slaveholders will find themselves obliged to conform their condition to the spirit of the age. Discovering that there are other more