Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/238

214 cessors of the present President and the present Secretary of the Treasury may intend deliberately to violate the law by the exercise of “perverse ingenuity”—all this to put the people into a panicky mood, and thus to drive them to Mr. McKinley as their only savior from a vague sort of disaster.

Of the same color is the prediction that the sound-money majority in Congress may be wiped out, and that then the gold-standard law will be repealed. You know, Mr. Secretary, that this is no more likely to happen than a heavy snowstorm in July in the latitude of Washington. It is admitted that there will be a sound-money majority in the Senate for at least two years longer. And if in two years the gold standard should appear to be in the slightest danger, is it not absolutely certain that then the same forces that carried the election of 1896 would be on hand to elect a sound-money House of Representatives? There can be no doubt of this.

No candid person can have watched recent political developments without concluding that even a Democratic House of Representatives, elected under the influence of the present public sentiment, would always have sound- money Democrats enough in it to prevent a subversion of the gold standard. You need only observe the present condition of the Democratic party to become convinced that the silver movement has lost its vitality, and that the talk about silver now is a mere rattling with dry bones, kept up on one side to have an appearance of consistency, and on the other to frighten people into forgetting all other questions and voting for Mr. McKinley. And this, Mr. Secretary, is the task you are now performing. It is an attempt so to terrorize the American people with a threat of business disaster that they may be deterred from considering any other question, and from casting a vote which would amount to a condemnation of Mr. McKin-