THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
with his ambitious scheme to establish a vassal empire in Mexico. A large part of the ruling class in Great Britain, which befriended and encouraged the Southern Confederacy, did not do so because it sympathized with slavery as such, but because it disliked and feared the American Republic as a democracy and a rival power which it would have been glad to see stripped of its strength and prestige. The French emperor was ready to recognize the Southern Confederacy as an independent State, and to intervene in its favor by at least breaking up our blockade of the Southern ports; and many Englishmen of great influence would willingly have co-operated with him in this direction. But the fact that the war carried on by the Southern Confederacy was universally regarded as a war for the maintenance of slavery, stood in the way. Neither the French emperor nor the British aristocracy could safely venture to defy the enlightened opinion and the moral sense of civilized mankind in general, and of the best part of their own subjects or constituencies in particular, by giving open and effective support to human slavery in its struggle for existence and power. It may, therefore, after all, truly be said that it was slavery that deprived the Southern cause of the effective sympathy which otherwise might have helped it to success, and that slavery thus put it in a position of fatal isolation in the world of the nineteenth century. Of this I shall have more to say hereafter.
I have to confess, however, that I erred in the estimation I expressed in that speech of the seriousness of the threats of revolution and disunion in case of a Republican victory at the presidential election, that came constantly from the South. For the reasons already given, such an attempt seemed to me so absolutely foolish, especially as the pro-slavery Democracy, even if they lost the executive, would still control the Senate,
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