Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/395

Rh his head without a moment's consideration—thus doing his duty for duty's sake. It would be going too far to say that, as a reward, every honest man was his friend; but surely every rascal was by instinct his enemy. And all good citizens have reason to wish that every one of his successors may, irrespective of political opinions, possess that conscience and moral force which were President Cleveland's distinguishing qualities.

It is said that his Administration was a failure. True, he failed in holding his party together. But who would have succeeded? He felt himself a party man because he believed in the “old” Democratic policies which aimed at economical, simple and honest government of, for and by the people. He sought to elevate his party again to the level of its original principles. It was his ambition to do the country good service in the name of that Democracy. It was his fate—a fate with something of the tragic in it—that his very endeavors to revive the best of the old Democracy served only to reveal the moral decay and the political disruption of the Democracy of his day, and to consign him to an isolation paralleled in our history only by that of John Quincy Adams. There could be no more whimsical irony of fortune than that, after Mr. Cleveland had led his party to victory over the McKinley tariff, not only the specific fruits of that victory were made repugnant to him by the treachery of other Democratic leaders, but that the greater treason of the National Convention of his party, by threatening the country with immeasurable calamities, forced him to favor the election of Mr. McKinley himself as his successor in the Presidential office, and to find in Mr. McKinley's victory a popular vindication of his own financial principles.

As to the Democracy for which he had stood, it survived only in those represented by the Indianapolis convention of sound-money Democrats—the saving remnant,