Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/383

Rh criticizing its terms as if they had had a liberal assortment of first-class bankers at hand, ready for a pledge to protect the Treasury against the withdrawal of gold, and to expose themselves for months ahead to the chances of embarrassment by war or commercial perturbations—all for nothing; or as if the President should have jeoparded an arrangement absolutely necessary to save the country from the immediate danger of bankruptcy, disaster and disgrace, by haggling over a fraction of a per cent, while Congress was wantonly throwing away the opportunity of saving sixteen millions. Many of those who then displayed their partisan zeal by such pettiness may now be heartily ashamed of it. They may now gratefully remember that President Cleveland not only was ever watchful and prompt to defeat by his veto vicious legislation supported mainly by men of his own party, such as the bill for coining the seigniorage, but that in those days of supreme peril he remained undismayed by the ferocious assaults made upon his good name as well as his statesmanship, and stood firm as a rock against the powers of evil which menaced the welfare and the honor of the American people. Nor should it be forgotten when we at last come to the true cure of our financial ills—the withdrawal of our greenbacks and a liberal extension of banking facilities—that he time and again commended these measures to an unwilling Congress. The country has never had in the Presidential office a stronger bulwark of its credit and a more faithful champion of sound finance than Grover Cleveland.

Probably the greatest and most painful disappointment of his whole political career was the fate his tariff reform policy met with. His tariff message of 1887 gave to his party, which for a long time had been floundering about, as a mere opposition, in vagueness of purpose, a positive and definite policy, a cause and a battlecry. Although