Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/432

412 of shame tingle in his cheeks? What does it mean, this reckless abandonment of truth and right and decency and manly pride?

It means that the party is to be served at any cost. It means that a party so controlled and animated by such a spirit demands any sacrifice for partisan success. It means that neither the restoration of fraternal feeling between the different portions of the American people, so needful to our National existence and welfare, nor our abhorrence of that system of wholesale robbery and scandalous misrule prevailing in the South, nor the sanctity of the Constitution and the laws of the country, nor the interests of the people as they are bound up in the honest and economic administration of public affairs nor even the pride and honor of the Nation must stand in the way of the effort to elect a candidate and to retain partisan power. It means that a Republican must not presume to serve his country by speaking the truth, if he wants to remain in good party standing. It means that a selfish party despotism has developed itself, which, by all the resources of reward and punishment, appeals to the low and sordid instincts of human nature, dragoons the ambitious into obedience by the terrors of a falsified and subjugated public opinion, and attempts to drag into its net the well-meaning by artful and systematic concealment of the truth, and fraud and deception; a party despotism which renders true reform impossible, by making it a partisan duty to whitewash abuses instead of correcting them, by obscuring our moral appreciation of right and wrong and teaching us to see in selfish advantage the supreme rule of action.

Do you want to discover the full power of demoralization of that despotism and the whole degradation of its victims? Look at them as they are lying at the feet of President Grant. I should prefer not to speak of him,