Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/549

Rh and as to the necessity always to “live in the harness and strive mightily,” he is very dangerously deficient in that patient prudence which is necessary for the peaceable conduct of international relations. I cannot, therefore, consistently with my conception of duty, support Colonel Roosevelt when a vote for him is to mean an approval and encouragement of the manifest-destiny swindle. I call it so because it is a flagrant breach of faith in turning a solemnly proclaimed war of humanity into a vulgar land-grabbing operation, glossed over by high-sounding cant about destiny and duty and what not. I cannot support him when his election is generally admitted to be the stepping-stone to a place in which his hot impulses and his extreme notions of militant imperialism might do the country greater and more irreparable harm than anything I can think of.

I am asked whether the defeat of Colonel Roosevelt might not benefit the silver movement and Tammany. I candidly do not think that it will benefit the silver movement. It may even serve to stir up the Republicans during the short session of Congress to apply themselves more vigorously to a long neglected duty regarding the needed currency legislation. But as a veteran in the fight against unsound currency and against Tammany, whose sincerity and zeal nobody has a right to question, I do not hesitate to express the solemn conviction that there are worse things even than free silver and Tammany, and that one of them is the imperialism which in its effects upon the character and the durability of the Republic I consider as pernicious as slavery itself was, and which we are now asked to countenance and encourage.

I shall vote for the Independent State ticket, which has Mr. Theodore Bacon at the top and Colonel Waring at the bottom. The candidates are men of high character, of correct principles on every point and of patriotic spirit.