Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/125

Rh Republican Party keeps that stake of untold millions of gain in our National elections, to be played for by a strong moneyed power; so long as the Republican Party is willing to be helped to victory by that power and then to do its bidding, so long it will need its Quays and Dudleys for the work to be done, and it will have them under whatever names; and its innocent good men will some day wake up and rub their eyes and wonder to what kind of work they have given their aid. Two or three years ago the Republican Senator Ingalls expressed these political maxims: “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.” When confronted with the startling nature of his utterance, he is said to have answered that this was not an expression of his own sentiments, but a description of the actual condition of things. So it is, a truthful description of our political warfare as the Republican tariff policy has made it, a political warfare for a large money prize.

All this has convinced me that for reasons superior to any economic considerations the true interests of the country demand the defeat of the Republican Party and its candidate, Mr. Harrison, unless there be objections of an overshadowing nature to the candidate opposed to him, Mr. Cleveland.

As to the Democratic Party, I think I give myself to no illusions. It has its share of high-minded, patriotic and able men, and it has its bad elements. I do not