Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/101

Rh why not another? Why not all? Is it surprising that such reasoning should become more and more general? Does not the notion rapidly gain ground that the government is a sort of grab-bag, full of spoil for those who are smart enough to get their hands into it; that those who succeed in doing so are not to be blamed, but only to be envied and imitated, and that the opportunity to put in the hand is something worth paying for? And have you considered how demoralizing an effect such a tendency must have on our political life? Is it not time that we should pause and inquire how far we have already drifted?

Some time ago, a Republican Senator, whom his colleagues had honored with the presidency pro tempore of the Senate, gave expression to these significant sentiments:

The purification of politics is an iridescent dream. Government is force. Politics is a battle for supremacy. Parties are the armies. The Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no place in a political campaign. The object is success. In war it is lawful to hire Hessians, to purchase mercenaries, to mutilate, to kill, to destroy. The commander who lost a battle through the activity of his moral nature would be the derision and jest of history. This modern cant about the corruption of politics is fatiguing in the extreme.

I can remember no period in the life of the Republican party, once proud of being called the party of moral ideas,—no period before this in which a Republican leader would have dared to avow such sentiments. Now we may indeed be startled by the brutal cynicism of the utterance; but must we not admit that Senator Ingalls truthfully portrayed the character of that political warfare which is to decide the question whether certain favored industrial interests shall be enabled to gain enormous profits or not? Do we not remember the last presidential campaign, in which sums of money contributed by those favored