Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/496

462 panting for action. You may know where they begin, but you cannot tell where they will end. They are propelled by passion, and passion outruns control. If you want to understand the full bearing of the Democratic program of counter-revolution, look at the men who are to execute it. There is Horatio Seymour. He, a respectable gentleman! Pleasant, plausible, smooth. Not a man of a ferocious temper by any means; but scan his political career from its first commencement to the present day, and what do you find? A sickly shrinking from great responsibilities; a continual effort to reach his ends by small means, by petty contrivances; a lack of true manhood. He has not even courage enough to say what he wants, and obtains his nominations for office by declining. He has never another word to say for his own expressed convictions of right as soon as he finds them overruled by his friends. He made an emphatic declaration in favor of paying the bonds in gold but a few days before the Democratic Convention, and then accepted the greenback platform without a murmur, as a matter of course. He loudly proclaimed himself a dishonored man if he should take the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, and then he very politely took it. He has been accused of wilful, mendacious misrepresentations of facts—facts open to everybody, but I candidly declare I believe he has not moral force enough to distinguish truth from falsehood. In one word, he is made to be the tool of a stronger will. In private life a sweet-tempered, kind-hearted gentleman, he is, in a position of power, just the man to be swayed by the passions of other people. If President, he would perhaps recoil before the counter-revolutionary program of his friends, but at the decisive moment he would feel that his delicate constitution needed a washing in the surf at Newport, or the strengthening perfumes of the far-off pineries in