Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/448

428 itself to the limits of a select circle, nor be hemmed in by the details of a political reform program formed by its first leaders. It swept into its current multitudes of different ways of thinking in many things, but meeting together in one impulse; to reunite the whole American people in the bonds of reconciliation and fraternal feeling, and to shake off the personal government and party despotism now hovering over the country. Acting upon that impulse it put forth its declaration of independence from party rule, and nominated Horace Greeley and Gratz Brown as its candidates for the President and Vice-President of the United States.

Fellow-citizens, it is the custom of public speakers in election campaigns to exhaust their whole ingenuity in picturing the cause they advocate as the absolute good and that of the opposite party as the absolute evil. That custom I shall not follow. As I speak of the other side without exaggeration, I shall speak of my own without reserve. The results of the Cincinnati Convention have dissatisfied some of those who until then earnestly sympathized with the movement. I should be recreant to the truth and unjust to my own feelings did I deny that those results were not satisfactory to me. I have endeavored to lift up that Convention to the very highest appreciation of its duties and opportunities, as I conceived them. I desired that its action should be not only above reproach, but also above suspicion. I wanted its declarations of policy as well as its candidates to be such that every candid man in the land would accept them, not only as an assurance of National reconciliation and of relief from selfish partisan rule, but also as a full guarantee that the victory of the movement would furnish an Administration approaching the ideal of good government as near as human wisdom, integrity and earnest efforts can carry it. I desired a platform, therefore, covering