Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/551

Rh fact, we begin to hear the idea of an economical administration of the government rather jeeringly spoken of as a picayunish, narrow-minded policy. No true friend of the country can witness such a tendency without serious concern. A democratic government which constantly raises a much larger revenue than it needs for an economical administration, and then embarks in lavish expenditures for the sake of spending the surplus—that government is in a very bad way. Such a practice, some time continued, will produce a carnival of rascality in our public affairs compared with which the Tweed régime in New York will appear like white innocence and virtue. Such a practice, raised to the dignity of a system, would be the moral ruin of the Republic.

When I thus see the Republican party sacrifice the professions and pledges of its better days—sacrifice the often repeated promise to reduce the tariff—sacrifice the whisky tax which but yesterday the Republican party would have almost unanimously scorned to abolish—sacrifice the idea of an economical administration of government so essential to the morals of a democratic republic—when I see it ready to sacrifice everything “rather than surrender any part of the protective system,” I am forced to the conclusion that the Republican party has fallen completely under the control of selfish, grasping interests, in which the spirit of monopoly is running mad.

The very arguments currently used in aid of that policy are calculated to make one distrustful of the cause they are to support. How in the world can anybody have the face to say that the Mills bill would destroy the protective system and thereby the industries of the country—the Mills bill, which proposes tariff reductions much smaller than those proposed time and again by Republicans high in authority, in fact averaging considerably less than those recommended by the Republican and protectionist