THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
the existing condition of political forces, and to the public sentiment of the whole country.
I am not surprised when you inform me that sympathies with the United States, regarded as a nation struggling to maintain its integrity against the assaults of faction, are less active in Europe than they might or ought to be in view of the benefits which the Republic has already conferred, and the still greater benefits which it promises to confer, on mankind.
Nations, like individuals, are too much wrapped up in their own interests and ambitions to be deeply concerned by accidents or reverses which befall other nations.
I can well enough conceive also that the United States in the first emergency might excite more fervent sympathies abroad by avowing a purpose not merely or even chiefly to maintain and preserve their existing constitutional organization, but to modify and change it so as to extirpate at once an institution which is obnoxious to the enlightened censure of mankind.
But, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that although sympathy of other nations is eminently desirable, yet foreign sympathy, or even foreign favor, never did and never can create or maintain any state, while in every state that has the capacity to live, the love of national life is and always must be the most energetic principle which can be worked to preserve it from suicidal indulgence of fear of faction as well as from destruction by foreign violence.
For my own part, it seems to me very clear that there is no nation on earth whose fortunes, immediate and remote, would not be worse for the dissolution of the American Union. If that consideration shall not be sufficient to save us from unjust intervention by any foreign state or states in our domestic troubles, then that intervention must come as a natural incident in our domestic strife, and I entertain no fears that we shall not be able to maintain ourselves against all who shall combine against us.
In a closing paragraph he referred to the failures of the Union armies, which he “had no time” for discussing, but added:
While you, who have gone abroad, are hearing of the failures of the government on all sides, there is not one citizen who has remained at home who is not more confident in the stability of the Union now than he was on the day of your departure upon your mission. This confidence is not built on enthusiasm, but on knowledge of the true state of the conflict, and the exercise of calm and dispassionate reflection.
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