Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/442

418 to oppose, without regard to mere party interest, any policy or any candidate whose victory would, in my honest opinion, have been injurious to the public welfare.

For this course I had reasons that enable me to bear those revilings with cheerful equanimity. The wrongs which during my long observation of public affairs I have seen done or condoned for the sake of party, and the crushing of individual conviction and the deadening of conscience through the tyranny of party organization that I have witnessed have deeply impressed me with the belief that it is high time the American people should remember and most earnestly take to heart the solemn warning in Washington's Farewell Address against an excessive party spirit as a very serious danger to our free institutions. A symptom of that party spirit we beheld in a feature of last year's election campaign, the appalling significance of which every thinking American should well consider. In the spring of 1896, Democratic conventions in many States most emphatically and unequivocally condemned free-silver coinage as a heresy fraught with incalculable disaster to the country. No sooner had, a few weeks later, the Democratic National Convention espoused that heresy, than the Democratic party organizations in the same States endorsed the very doctrine they had so loudly condemned and men of otherwise respectable character supported this amazing self-stultification, because they would rather risk the ruin of the Republic than forfeit their party regularity. Nor is this submissiveness confined to the Democratic side. This very day we see the Republican party in several States under the despotic control of mutual assurance companies of spoils politicians called machines, and under the tyranny of bosses of most unsavory repute, respected only for their iniquitous power—while the rank and file, and even men of high standing, trembling lest they lose their party regularity, submit to