Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/72

38 fight a battle with its enemies, without any certainty of its issue. Is that your place? Or will you go to the Republican side, where the loyal maintenance of our public faith has become a fundamental principle, universally adhered to with unswerving fidelity, in spite of the gusts of adverse public sentiment in former days? And you who desire to preserve the fruits of the success gained in the abolition of the curse of an irredeemable paper money and the reëstablishment of specie payments, where will you go? Will you go to the Democratic party, where again you will find some who think as you do, and yet with them as a powerful and perhaps the most numerous component part of the organization, wielding commanding influence in a great many of the States subject to its control, the great mass of the inflationists and fiat-money men who were gathered under the Democratic banner by a seemingly irresistible power of attraction, and furnished many of the acknowledged leaders of that organization, and who even now, when the prosperity of the country has been so magnificently aided by a sound financial policy, would be ready to subvert it all and throw the country back into the wild confusion of the fiat-money madness? Will you, business men, farmers, manufacturers, merchants of the country, find the safety of your interests there? Will you help a party to power, inside of which, between its component elements, the battle of a sound-money system and an irredeemable paper currency is still pending, and will you trust the earnings of the poor as well as the fortunes of the wealthy to the uncertainties of its issue? Or will you go to the Republican side, where great victories for the cause of good money have been achieved; where sound sense and patriotism have won every fight so far decided, and where we may with certainty look for the same sound sense and patriotism to solve the problems not yet disposed of?