Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/280

246 as well as private trust increase in number and magnitude, in ebbs and tides, to be sure, but the advancing tides growing all the time more formidable; how men of high position among their fellow-citizens, standing at the head of great financial institutions, now and then despoil those who trusted their money to them by acts little short of downright robbery. You watch the great corporations which the industrial developments of our times have brought forth; how powerful they are; how the financial management of them by hook or crook accumulates enormous fortunes in single hands; how this accumulated wealth sometimes grows more greedy and unscrupulous the more it increases; how it seeks to control for its purposes governments and legislatures and courts and the feeders and organs of public opinion, and how in some cases it has succeeded. With growing apprehension you see the Senate of the United States gradually invaded by millionaires whose whole distinction is wealth and whose world of action is making money. And an instinctive fear creeps over you that, unless this dangerous tendency be checked, or at least kept within bounds, not only our social life will be disastrously demoralized, but that our political contests will become mere wrangles between different bands of public robbers, legislation only a matter of purchase and sale and the whole government a festering mass of corruption; and that thus this great Republic will rapidly go the way of many predecessors—grow, flourish, become corrupt, rot and perish.

Examine your own inmost thoughts and you will have to admit that just there you see our danger. It is an instinctive apprehension, but the instinct is correct. You may, indeed, say that we are after all still far from the ultimate catastrophe. You may also say that we can never expect to have a state of moral perfection in politics. That is true. There will probably always be