Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/58

24 nominating the fiat-money man, Landers, for the governorship of those States; nor does it prevent the Democrats in many of the Western and Southern States from pursuing their greenback agitation as lustily as before.

While they declare for an observance of our national obligations, that does not hinder the Democrats in many of the Southern States from going on in their work of local repudiation, and declaring that local repudiation is so good a thing that it ought to be made general. But all these factions, these incongruous elements, are held together by one great impulse—that is, the appetite for public plunder, which the exclusion from power for twenty years has stimulated to a degree of keenness scarcely ever seen before. Now consider that, if General Hancock ever can be elected, it must be by a very hearty coöperation of all these elements—the Greenback-Democrats in Ohio, Maine and Indiana and the West and South, with the hard-money men in New York, New Jersey and other States; the protectionists in one quarter and the free traders in another; the war-Democrats in the North and the reactionary elements elsewhere; and to all these elements together, General Hancock, if successful at all, will owe his success; and all those elements, if the successful party is to be maintained in its strength and continued in power, must be satisfied in order to hold them together.

That will be the situation and such the problem which the soldier, to whom political science and management so far have been a sealed book, will have to solve. What will he do to satisfy the hard-money men without driving the Greenbackers away? What will he do to keep the Greenbackers in the party without betraying the principles of the hard-money men? How will he satisfy the Southern element, that claims to have been robbed by an anti-slavery war, and is entitled to restitution in some shape, and at the same time keep the management of the