Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/227

Rh illustration of the power of republican institutions to withstand the most deadly assaults.” A dreadful state of things indeed! There was a Secretary of the Interior so unscrupulous as to recognize as valid certified lists about which “there is no controversy”; a Secretary who did not blush to ask the Attorney-General for legal advice and to follow it; who dared to permit granted lands to be patented, and who, after having tried to wrest many millions of acres from the railroad corporations, had the audacity to bow to an overruling decision of the Supreme Court. That our republican institutions should have endured such a strain is indeed almost incredible. But the danger of the situation was vastly aggravated by the singular circumstance that the whole American people witnessed these open and notorious proceedings without alarm. Only one man saw through it all, and you were that man. What did you do? When all these terrible things were going on, did we hear the blast of your bugle- horn summoning all friends of the imperiled Republic to the rescue? No. Where were you, then, at that awful crisis?

Alas, you were otherwise engaged. You were then going round among the railroad kings offering them your talents for a consideration. And only when the railroad kings failed to purchase your services, you became conscious of your own exceeding virtue and the total depravity of everybody else.

This revelation, however, is not surprising. You had already unmasked yourself before. Had you been sincere you would have been content to speak the truth. Instead of reviling with ridiculous charges a man who in official station had proved more dutiful than you, you would have fairly recognized my earnest endeavor to reduce the allowances of the corporations to the narrowest limit under the law. But it seems to be the uncontrollable