Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/138

114 was the Republican Party which in its platform of 1888 formally denounced the Democrats for being hostile to silver. It was the Republican Party that, having thus stimulated the greed and excited the expectations of the mining interest, passed, without any necessity, the law of 1890, which, even without free coinage, threatens finally to sweep us over the precipice.

On the other hand, considering the fact that the free-coinage movement was numerically strongest among the Democrats, nothing has done more to weaken and practically to defeat it than Mr. Cleveland's influence with his party. When he, well knowing that a large portion of his party was clamoring for free coinage, boldly raised his voice against it, the spectacle of a man who seemed at that time to be sure of the nomination for the Presidency if he would only remain silent, but who threw to the winds his chances for the highest place in the Republic by antagonizing, in obedience to his convictions of the public good, so powerful an element in his party—that spectacle was so novel and so impressive that it powerfully staggered multitudes of free-coinage Democrats, who became convinced that a man who acted thus must be very sure of being right. From that time on, the reaction set in, and the free-coinage movement among the Democrats, especially in the South, lost not only in numbers but in spirit. Its aggressive force was gone. It made, on the Democratic side, thenceforth, only half-hearted fights in Congress, and accepted its defeats with perfect meekness. It could not prevent the adoption by the National Democratic Convention of an anti-free-coinage resolution much stronger than that of the Republican platform, and it would not resist the nomination of an anti-free-coinage candidate. And, more than to anything else, all this has been owing to Mr. Cleveland's moral influence with his party.