Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/139

Rh I regard the free-coinage movement as gradually dying out, on one condition. If Mr. Cleveland is elected to the Presidency, he will have much more prestige with his party as well as with Congress than he had during his first term; in fact, more than any President has had for the last twenty years. And all that influence will work vigorously in favor of sound finance. There is one service he will render to that cause which Mr. Harrison, be his financial principles and purposes ever so correct, will be incapable of rendering. Under Mr. Cleveland's leadership the free-coinage heresy will lose its foothold in the party in which it was numerically strongest. And thus the fight will indeed be decisively won and ended.

There is one thing, however, which may restore the free-coinage movement to new hope, life and strength. That is the removal of Mr. Cleveland from the leadership of the Democratic Party by his defeat in the election. He might die, and the moral influence of his teachings and example would survive. But if he is defeated, he is sent to the rear, and that powerful moral influence he exercised will be a thing of the past. For there is at present no other Democratic leader who can fill that place, as there is at present no public man who can exert such an influence in either party. I, therefore, cannot impress it too strongly upon those who are anxious as to the soundness of the financial policy of the Government, that they can serve that cause in no better way than by keeping Mr. Cleveland, under whose first Administration not a single objectionable financial measure was enacted, in the leadership of the Democratic Party; and that can be done only by electing him President again.

Or would any one be deterred from voting for Mr. Cleveland by the Republican complaint regarding the suppression of the negro vote in some of the Southern States? There again every consideration of sound