The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1872-08-15
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die for principle, but who live in it and for
it, embodyng it in every act of their lives, in
every trait of their characters Are the hO-
nest ideals of human nature, are reform or
progress safe in the keeping of men and wO-
men whose deeds mock and whose characters
outrage the very ideas which their lips pro-
lanef Ihere are men clinging to the skirts
OF Horace Greeley, hoping thereby to be drag
ged back to respectability and place, who,
had not their shameless deeds DESTROYED i'm
them the very sense of moral degradation,
would hide their faces before the sight Of
heaven.
Half the shout of reform is simply an out
cry for change. There are men who at any
price must have change. They tickle their
Imagination by calling it "Refom." Men
disappointed unsatistied, demagogues who
have missed power, Adventures hungerihg
for place, cormorants prowlng on the out
skirts of plunder-each and all see their only
chance in some sort of change. They steal
the very name of ''Reform," and bear it as a
banner toward their dreamed-Of goal. In
politics, as in morals, there are men who are
born disorganizers. Their power to destroy
is illimitable. Their passion is to tear down,
not to build up. Carl Schurz is an orator and
a revolutiOnist; the very law of his nature for
bids his being other or more. He was born a
reyolutionist, has been one all his life; and
through his wonderful mental activity, wherey-
er he is or ever has been. it self as tre-
mendous dsorganizing force. Heaven itself
could be no heaven to him till he had first
turned it into hell of anarchy and revolution.
Fermentation, turmoil, accusation, strife
these to him in government are progress,
reformation! If by any possibility the latter
were achieved, he of all men would be the
most miserable. With no corruption" at
which to thrust his glittering rapier he would
perish. But he never will. If there is none,
ha mail riSb nf rbn car la
it. The men who are now so busy spanning
with howery phrases the "bloody chasm"
which war made, who are so eager to stretch
fraternal hands across to the crowd on the
other side-they are the men who through
the long night of civil war, while their breth-
ren marched and fought and fell and died,
staid at home, safe and panpered, and vented
their patriotism in odes and essays, resonant
with the guns which their writers never heard.
Do you wonder that the long agony of war is
to them distant dream? Woman, whose
son, whose husband, whose father fell in that
holocaust of human freedom, is it but dream
to you? These are the men who cry Rec
onciation. They say that the word for the
hour is ''RecOnciliation." Reconciliation
with what? With the spirit that, generation
on generation, perpetuated itself by the bar
barisms of human slavery and the uSurpation
of political power at any cost? Did not these
cause our war? To extinguish these were
not our dead slain? Shall we give it up now
the principle established by such treasure of
human liie-to the very men who betrayed
it and did all that thev could do to destroy it?
You are told that they are all changed, these
leaders; that they clamor for Greeley because
they accept the situation. Never believe it.
They cry for him because they do not accept
it; because they find in him their last chance
to seize once more the prizes aud the power
of the government. Years Of protracted res
idence at the South during and since the war
have made me perfectly conyersant with
Southern character and opinion. Why deny
their never -ceasing boast that, in the largest
sense, they are not Americans, they are sec
Journalists, Sontherners. Ii is not their couil-
try, their whole country. 1t never was, and
never win be. 1t is the South against the
North. To restore the prestige of the South,
to regain its supremacy, to work out its own
ends in the general government, is to them
the sole object to be gained, at any cost.
There is minority at the South who
have accepted the result OF the war
without murmur-brave and 10y
al men and women, who. have
dared to love their whole country, and who
have seen in the civilization of the North the
only hope of the future of the South. The
early Christians were not hunted and put to
death by Pagans more ruthlessly than they
have been by their own brethren, in the
masks of Ku-KluX. 1t was to defend the
rights and preserve the lives of these true
men and women against the hand of the Sc
cession murderer that the Ku-Klux law was
passed, against which such an outcry is
now made, as an act of usurpaton ON the
part of President Grant, by the followers of
the very man who came to Washington and
declared that "the government should be
wiped from the face of the earth if it did not
enact it." Stringent as it was, it was often
foe fhn lixaC. - Anna o,f;
zens against the murderous attacks of the
midnight assassin. Is it the new South the
South regenerated in blood and tears, that is
now for Horace Greeley? No. it is the old
South 1t is the South which to-day in Sc
cret clans declares eternal fealty to the Lost
Cause;" which swears by everything sacred
it will seek not only the sectional supremacy
of the South, but its future independence.
Why do they shout for Horace Greeley? Be
cause they accept his ancient faith of the
equal rights of all men? No. They kiss his
feet because he bailed Jefferson Davis; be-
cause he has acknowledged the right of any
State to secede; because, in his long presi-
Dental electioneering tour through the South
he directly or indirectly pledged himself if
| elected, to pensions for rebel soldiers; be-
| cause, if elected, they believe that they can
command through him their forfeited suprem-
| acy, the prestige, and the tyranny, which the
| war destroyed, and to whose loss the old
South refuses to be reconciled. Are we to be
',reconciled'' to their return to power? New
| er. Between the feudal South and the new,
born of freedom, there can be no reconeilia-
ton, now or ever.
The whole country is commanded to adj
mire the marriage between the Democratic
party and the selfcalled Liberal Republican.
| 1t commands the amount of respect due to
any marriage of convenience and no more.
In vain we are told that the Democratic par
| ty, regenerated and baptized into the faith of
Republicans, casts its own disgraceful past
behind, and, with spontaneous love for that
which it has always hated, suddenly seeks its
| ancient enemy in loving marriage. The sham
is too transparent. Everybody-no one bet
ter than the welded parties themselves
knows that the union is one of pure expedi-
ency.