Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/51

Rh governor at the head of the system, the highest right of the citizen was completely at the mercy of any set of registration officers who might combine their interests with those of candidates for office. Call such a system whatever you will, but call it not republican government. Let such a system be defended by whosoever may do it, but let it not be the Republican party that mourns over its downfall.

Well, sir, it was this system, demonstrating itself in its workings as the very incarnation of arbitrary party despotism, as the very nursery of fraud, and the most scandalous political demoralization; this system which, however good the intentions of its originators may have been, was bound in time to stifle all sense of honor, shame and decency in any party supporting it, and to hand that party over as a mere engine of corruption and tyranny to the most unscrupulous of political schemers; it was this system which the wire-pullers and spoilsmen in our State convention attempted to shield by a dishonest equivocation.

I ask you, sir, in the face of these glaring facts, what good American, bearing the faintest love to the purity of democratic institutions, what honest Republican caring in the least for the honor and good faith of his party, could have hesitated to condemn it in the strongest language, and not only to advise but to implore the people to relieve themselves of the disgrace? Who could have stooped to a declaration of neutrality on such a question, a dodge which was avowedly devised as a hint in favor of the continuation of the system?

The vote was taken. Our resolution, pronouncing for the adoption of the constitutional amendment abolishing disfranchisement, was voted down; the substitute was adopted, and the proscriptionists and spoilsmen had carried their point in the convention. Then we went