Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/527

 history of the United States and partly to study the transformations in social conditions since his famous observations and report twenty years earlier. In May, 1885, he summed up the results of his tour in a pamphlet of thirty-three pages entitled The New South. His judgments on the general course of events in reconstruction as well as on the undoing of reconstruction were eminently just and candid. In the South he found the present full of prosperity, and the future very hopeful. He believed that economic usefulness would be the solution of the negro problem. When the blacks should make a little more progress in the accumulation of property and in general intelligence their party allegiance would become divided; the diversification of industry, already far advanced, would at the same time divide the whites; and through the normal operation of economic and political motives the color line would disappear, whites and blacks voting side by side in the party to which their interests assigned them. Not giving sufficient weight to the persistency of race antipathies, Mr. Schurz's predictions to-day seem doubtful of fulfilment; but when they were made they expressed the faith of Secretary Lamar and many other philosophical Southerners.

The New South attracted less attention than its literary and philosophic merits deserved. After its publication Mr. Schurz devoted himself seriously to the Henry Clay, which was finished in the summer of 1886 and published late in the following winter. The reception which it met with was in the highest degree flattering. Though Clay was in almost every respect remote from the ideals of character and statesmanship that his biographer worshiped, the justice and fidelity of the portrait were universally recognized. Aged veterans of the dim decades before 1850, Whigs and Jackson Democrats alike, testified to Schurz, in letters of tremulous prolixity,