Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/137

Rh perhaps some reductions to prevent the formation of trusts and monopolies. This will be a movement in the right direction, but nothing like a sudden and violent revolution. This is my candid opinion, and I apprehend the record of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives bears me out. Of the economic side of our tariff I should like to speak at greater length, but I have to put off that pleasure to another time.

“But what about the free coinage of silver and a consequent financial crisis?” I hear another business man say. No man can be more anxious to secure and preserve to this country a sound monetary system than I am; and it is my candid conviction that the election of Mr. Cleveland will not only not endanger but greatly promote that end. The free-coinage movement is essentially not a partisan, but a sectional movement. In the silver-mining States, in some of the Western agricultural States and in the Southern States it swept into its current Republicans and Democrats alike. In the rest of the country Democrats and Republicans alike were opposed to it. In the Republican Senate of the United States Republican free-coinage men took the leadership and carried a free-coinage bill twice through that body. But free coinage was numerically strongest in the Democratic Party, simply because so large a number of Democratic Senators and Representatives hailed from the South. Still the energetic opposition of the Northern and Eastern Democrats, united with the Northeastern and some Northwestern Republicans, succeeded twice in defeating free coinage in the Democratic House of Representatives. The fact is, it was the Republican Party that made the most dangerous political use of the silver question. It was the Republican party that began the deplorable policy of concession to the mining interest, which, bringing forth more and more extravagant demands, led us on the dangerous slope. It