Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/200

174 try further expansion, and the result will be exactly the same. You go on trying in that way “to make the volume of currency equal to the wants of trade,” and the inflation will be indefinite, until finally the currency becomes so worthless as to effect no exchanges at all, and the whole edifice tumbles down in universal repudiation, bankruptcy and ruin.

Is there any advocate of the Democratic platform who can gainsay this? If not, then let us hear no more about that platform not meaning inflation. It means inflation indefinite, unlimited, until the currency is utterly worthless.

Besides, you need only listen, not to the trimming apologizers, but to the real makers and exponents of the Democratic platform, and you hear nothing but the roar for “more money! more money!” If it did not mean inflation, it would have no value at all to them. To quibble about it is not only a useless, it is simply a ridiculous attempt at evasion. The inflationists of Ohio themselves will laugh at you, did you tell them that the platform does not mean “more money; much, very much more money!”

Now let me return to the point from which this was a digression. I affirmed that those who advocated an inflation of our irredeemable paper currency, pretending to be 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 yet experienced, thus betraying the very principles the Democratic party puts in the foreground in soliciting the confidence and support of the people.

First, then, as to the limitation of governmental power.

You, my Democratic friends, insist that a strict limitation of the powers of government, according to Constitutional principles, is the most essential and indispensable safeguard of popular liberty and free institutions. I