Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/414

 Tennessee and Virginia had chosen Conservative or Democratic State governments in 1869. The tendency thus manifested was held by the extremists to justify any degree of rigor in maintaining Republican ascendancy in the other States.

Schurz regarded such a spirit as in the highest degree mischievous. In the long debates on the Georgia question and on the Enforcement Act during the spring of 1870, he set forth his general views on the Southern situation. Like every other rebellion in history, ours must have its epilogue, he said; and the unrest and disorder in the South were incidents of this. They had a far deeper source than mere party politics; they were evidences of that “process of second fermentation” through which he anticipated that all the Southern States would have to pass. The proper treatment of this condition must be like that of a fever: watchfulness and care in guiding its course, but no radical or drastic action till time should have done its work. The “inveterate habits, opinions and ways of thinking of Southern society” must be transformed, and such a change can be of but slow growth. The greatest obstacle to a restoration of sound conditions would be legislative and executive action of purely partisan and extra-constitutional character. This would confirm the influence of the worst elements in the South and would provoke a disastrous Democratic reaction. The great need of the time, he believed, was that the Southern question should be wholly detached from partisan politics, and that the national government should leave the reconstructed States to work out their own problems. The most important positive action that Congress should take was the removal of the disabilities that still excluded many of the ablest Southerners from political life.

There was discernible in Mr. Schurz's attitude on the