Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/204

178 You not only admit that power of the National Government to change at will all current values in the country, to dispose of the private fortune of every citizen at its arbitrary pleasure—nay, in the face of the efforts of others to strip the Government of a discretion so despotic, you insist that that power shall be exercised by what you euphoniously call “making and keeping the currency equal to the wants of trade,” by the interference of Government. And you still call yourselves Democrats, and claim the confidence of the people by your fidelity to the great principle that popular liberty and free institutions must be secured by a strict limitation of the powers of government!

When President Grant trifled with the war-making power in the San Domingo case, I with others denounced his action as a transgression of his Constitutional authority, and you applauded. When the Ku-Klux act was passed, when an act of usurpation setting up an illegal government in Louisiana was countenanced and aided by the Administration, when the Federal military invaded the legislative hall of that State, I was among those who protested against such unconstitutional assumptions of authority. Step by step we fought against what appeared as an advance of dangerous centralization. And you applauded.

But now I declare, those unconstitutional assumptions and those centralizing attempts appear as mere trifles compared with the arbitrary, despotic character of that power to kick the fortune of every citizen about as the football of its whims, which you, Democrats of Ohio, according to your platform, not only recognize as belonging to the Government, but attempt to fix upon the Government as a permanent system, by making its abolition simply impossible. Nay, you insist that such power be actively exercised. If that is Democracy, then, I entreat you, trifle no longer with the intelligence of the