Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/317

Rh people of their duty as citizens to form a conscientious judgment upon these same things, and to vote accordingly? I wonder whether you would apply your triumphant-acquittal rule with equal readiness to other cases. I am informed that your opinion of General Butler has long been quite unfavorable. General Butler was elected to the governorship of Massachusetts two years ago. He has been nominated for the Presidency by Greenbackers and Anti-monopolists. Did that change in any way the facts constituting his record? Did it change your opinion of those facts? Were that election and these nominations, in your opinion, a “triumphant acquittal”? The mere statement of the proposition is sufficient to show the absurdity of it.

As to Mr. Blaine's case, the generality of American citizens are now for the first time called upon to declare whether his public record is regarded by them as compatible with the standard according to which the American people are willing to bestow the highest honor and trust in this Republic. If the American people declare that it is, then our public men, great and small, will have learned that they may work in their “various channels of usefulness” to make themselves rich, with the same spirit of enterprise and the same brilliant audacity in the handling of facts which they will have been taught to admire in the model set up for them without fear of endangering their preferment in the highest places. What the consequent effects of this upon the future of the Republic are likely to be, I have endeavored to set forth in my Brooklyn speech. Of the effect which Mr. Blaine's mere nomination has already produced, your way of defending him furnishes, I regret to say, an instructive example.

7. You are greatly mistaken when you “take it for granted that what Mr. Schurz has not said in this speech