THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
something be done to give our cause a stronger foothold in the popular heart, they will, in the end, not be decided and powerful enough to control the actions of those governments whose good will or neutrality is to us of the greatest importance. When the struggle about the slavery question in the United States assumed the form of an armed conflict, it was generally supposed in Europe that the destruction of slavery was to be the avowed object of the policy of the government, and that the war would, in fact, be nothing less than a grand uprising of the popular conscience in favor of a great humanitarian principle. If this opinion had been confirmed by the evidence of facts, the attitude of Europe, as determined by popular sentiment, could not have been doubtful a single moment. But it was remarked, not without a feeling of surprise and disappointment, that the Federal Government, in its public declaration, cautiously avoided the mentioning of the slavery question as the cause and origin of the conflict; that its acts, at the beginning of the war, at least, were marked by a strikingly scrupulous respect for the sanctity of slave property; and that the ultimate extinction of an institution so hateful to European minds was most emphatically denied to be one of the objects of the war. I do not mean to question the wisdom of the government under circumstances so difficult and perplexing, but I am bearing witness to the effect its attitude produced upon public opinion in Europe. It is exceedingly difficult to make Europeans understand, not only why the free and prosperous North should fight for the privilege of being re-associated with the imperious and troublesome Slave States, but also, why the principle, by virtue of which a population, sufficiently strong for establishing and maintaining an independent national existence, possesses the right to have a government and institutions of its own choice, should be repudiated in America while it is almost universally recognized in monarchical Europe. I have had to discuss this point with men whose sympathies were most sincerely on our side, and all my constitutional arguments failed to convince them that such a right can be consistently denied, unless our cause were based upon principles of a higher nature. I know that journalists who, in their papers, work for us to the best of their ability, are secretly troubled with serious scruples on that point. The agents of the South, whose footprints are frequently visible in the public press, are availing themselves of this state of things with great adroitness. While they carefully abstain from alluding to the rights of slavery, they speak of free trade and cotton to the merchant and the manufacturer, and of the right of self-government to the liberal. They keep it well before the people that the same means of repression which are of so baneful a memory to most European nations—the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, arbitrary
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