THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
ple might do to save it—in fact, that any effort to save it by secession would inevitably result in terrible disaster to the Southern people themselves. This was my peroration:
“Slave-holders of America, I appeal to you. Are you really in earnest when you speak of perpetuating slavery? Shall it never cease? Never? Stop and consider where you are and in what days you live.
“This is the nineteenth century. Never since mankind has recollection of times gone by has the human mind disclosed such wonderful powers. The hidden forces of nature we have torn from their mysterious concealment, and yoked them into the harness of usefulness; they carry our thoughts over slender wires to distant nations; they draw our wagons over the highways of trade; they pull the gigantic oars of our ships; they set in motion the iron fingers of our machinery; they will soon plow our fields and gather our crops. The labor of the brain has exalted to a mere bridling and controlling of natural forces the labor of the hand; and you think you can perpetuate a system which reduces man, however degraded, yet capable of development, to the level of the soulless machine?”
It might seem in the light of subsequent events that the slave-holders were not isolated, not as much without sympathy in the world, when struggling for the establishment of their independent empire, as I had predicted they would be. But it only seemed so. The apparent sympathy that was given them really sprang only from a wish cherished by foreigners that this great Republic should be disrupted and thus cease to threaten other nations with a dangerous rivalry on various fields of activity and ambition. The French Emperor, Louis Napoleon, did not in fact sympathize with the cause of slavery as such, but he hoped that the slave-holders' insurrection would succeed in breaking up the Union, and thus render it unable to interfere
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