Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/69

Rh country, to which, as parties now are, the solution of new financial problems can alone be safely trusted. And how magnificently do the effects of the results already achieved appear in the revival of our business prosperity!

It may be said that our financial policy has not wholly originated that prosperity. True, but it has most powerfully aided it by giving us that confidence which is impossible without stable money values and a sound currency system. And what prudent man would now risk these great results by turning over our financial policy to the hands of a party which, as I have shown, is the refuge of all destructive elements threatening new uncertainty and confusion?

Indeed, not only in the traditions and good sense of the Republican party do you find the best security there is at present for the sanctity of our national faith as well as a successful management of the financial policy; you find equal security in the known opinions and principles of its candidate, James A. Garfield. His convictions on these subjects have not found their first and best proclamation in the platform of his party or in his letter of acceptance. His record of nearly twenty years of Congressional service is not a blank on the great questions of the times, like that of his opponent. There is not a phase of the question of our national obligations; there is not a point of financial policy, from the first day that the subject was considered in Congress since he became a member of that body to the present hour, that he has not discussed with an ability and strength, a lucidity of argument, amplitude of knowledge and firmness of conviction, placing him in the first rank of the defenders of sound principles.

If you want to study the reasons why the public faith should be inviolably maintained, why an irredeemable paper currency is, and always has been, a curse to all the