Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/286

252 the front, and Caldwell got his money. You see? I want him to send me a definite proposition at once. Yours truly,

Well, if such letters could be found among Washington's and Lincoln's private correspondence, and if it could be further discovered that Washington and Lincoln had publicly declared that the interest they had in those contracts was only such as any other citizen might have purchased on the Boston market, and that they could not have exercised any power with regard to those contracts, because in the one case it was the business of the Commissary and in the other of the Ordnance Department, and if Washington and Lincoln had taken those letters from Mr. Fisher's bookkeeper without authority and kept them notwithstanding a promise to return them, and if Washington and Lincoln before a committee of Congress investigating these things had time and again protested against inquiry into their private business, and if Washington and Lincoln had accumulated large fortunes while in office—then, I admit, the parallel would be justified, and Washington and Lincoln, too, might be enrolled in the order of Americans with a big A.

But as history knows them it would have been a delight to see Washington's boot kick the man suggesting such propositions out of his tent, and to hear Lincoln crying out at the insulting tempter, “Do you take me for a knave?” and whirling him down the stairs of the White House.

You see what Mr. Blaine's nomination has already done for us. Not only has it taken the moral backbone out of many living men who were aggressively honest before, but it has led even to the desecration of the graves of the dead. Washington and Lincoln had to be paraded