Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/118

94 more or less apologetic way, with constant promises of revision in the direction of lower duties. In election campaigns it had figured only by the side of other more prominent issues upon which the Republican Party relied for success.

Even then, carried to that length, our tariff policy had begun to produce a very deleterious effect upon the ways of thinking and the character of the American people. The Americans had been in their daily life, in the employment of their energies, their enterprise, their struggle for success on every field of activity, the most independent, self-reliant, self-helping people in the world. This quality was the glory of American manhood. To it more than to anything else the American people owed their rapid progress, their prosperity, their greatness, aye, even the preservation of the vital element in their democratic institutions. But the protective system, in its more recent expansion over constantly widening fields, is teaching them, impelling them, seducing them—not a mere handful of manufacturers, but almost all classes of the people—to look to the government for aid and support and protection against loss in almost everything they do. I maintain, and I cannot lay too much stress upon it, any economic system that has the effect of weakening the spirit of self-reliance, self-help, individual responsibility among the people and of making them look to a paternal government for what they should look for to themselves—every such system will deteriorate our national character, will eventually undermine our free institutions, and is essentially an un-American system. That system is bringing forth a most characteristic fruit even now.

In 1884 something happened which by the Republican politicians had been represented as equivalent to the destruction of the country. The Republicans were defeated in a Presidential election. A Democratic