Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/288

262 only now been communicated to me, escaped my notice during a recent journey. In them I find the accusation directed against me that I have “turned back” upon the path which I have been travelling for years; that my “present course is absolutely irreconcilable with all that I have advocated and commended until within the last few weeks”; that I am “treading under foot my own convictions,” etc., etc.

Wherefore these charges? Because I prefer Mr. Hayes to the Democratic ticket. You will admit, on calm reflection, that the accusations hurled against me are very serious, and your sense of justice will not deny to me an examination of them in the same journal which made them. I request of you, therefore, the publication of this letter in the Staats-Zeitung, not merely by means of extracted passages, but entire.

What convictions, then, are those which you so carelessly accuse me of having “trodden under foot”? Of course you can only refer to those which touch the most important questions of our political life. Can you, yourself, really believe that I must have become false to my own convictions in regard to the financial question, because I prefer the Republican to the Democratic candidates? Let us see who has changed his views!

You know fully as well as I do, and have often enough admitted the fact in your paper, that, with reference to the financial question, the Republican party is assuredly not all that it should be, but that it is much “sounder” on the whole than the Democratic party. The history of the last few years, the votes in Congress, the elections in single States, the party organs, furnish indisputable evidence that a heavy majority of the “soft-money” element, and about all the lust of repudiation that exists, are to be found on the Democratic side. Now, if such a party—which still almost daily, as I write, shows it-