Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/44

10 While adhering to one party I desire the other to be as good as possible, so as to compel my own to do its best. In this respect, therefore, I sincerely declare that I wish well to the Democratic party. I once participated in an attempt, which attempt miscarried, to move it up to the progressive requirements of the times. The contending political parties in a republic should be such in point of mental and moral constitution and capability that the government may be intrusted to either without serious apprehension for the safety of the public interest. I hope it will be so some day, and I wish it were so now. Let us see whether it is so now.

To speak in all candor, it appears to me that the Democratic party labors under historic as well as constitutional difficulties. Since the downfall and disappearance of the slave-power as a compact political interest, from which the Democratic party, more than twenty years ago, derived its morals, its logic, its political skill and statesmanship, that party has been floundering about, out of logical connection with the questions of the day; never knowing the time of day; always looking for something to turn up, and when something did turn up, spoiling it; lamely lagging in the rear of the events and requirements of the day; always behind; denouncing as impossible things that were already accomplished facts; with a strange incapacity to understand the present and to measure the future, making itself the recipient and rallying point for all dangerous and obstructive tendencies and elements, and thus committing blunder after blunder, which at the moment of their birth it uniformly gloried in as great strokes of policy, from the secession movement in 1861 down to the nomination of General Hancock in 1880.

There are many good and clear-headed men in the Democratic party, men whom I personally esteem and whose friendship I value, who deplore this condition of things