Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/194

168 Were you, Democrats of Ohio, in earnest and in good faith also, when you represented the strictest limitation of governmental powers and hostility to corruption and extravagance as your pet principles? Examine your present attitude. You adopted in your State convention a platform insisting upon an augmentation by the General Government of its irredeemable paper currency. And now I assert that those who advocate an inflation of our irredeemable paper currency, although calling themselves Democrats, are advocating an assumption and exercise of power by the Government far more overreaching and dangerous, and a corruption and profligacy far more demoralizing and oppressive than any we have so far experienced. If I make good that assertion, you will not be able to deny that your Ohio platform is a reckless and barefaced abandonment of the very principles the Democratic party pretends to be proudest of.

But, before proceeding to this demonstration, I must notice an evasion resorted to by some Democratic leaders, who seem to feel the soreness of that point. Here and there the pretense is put forth that the Ohio platform does not mean an inflation of our irredeemable paper currency at all, but merely an adaptation of it to the wants of trade. This argument is used to calm the apprehensions of those who recoil from naked inflation and the prospect of ruin it opens. Never was a deception more insidious.

Democrats, let us be candid as serious men, and have at least the courage of our opinions and purposes. Let us throw aside the art of the juggler when the highest interests of the people are at stake. What does the Democratic platform say? It states that the contraction of the currency wrought by the Republican party—which contraction, by the way, is only imaginary, as every well-informed man in the country knows—has brought about the present depression of business; and having made this