Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/384

360 moral law and the dictates of conscience, will, if it prevails, inevitably destroy the vitality of free institutions.

Whatever induces people to look to the Government for favors to advance their material fortunes, instead of relying upon their own independent energies, will tend to deteriorate the popular character.

Of all agencies of corruption, the farthest reaching and the most generally demoralizing is a system of policy by which the Government deals out benefits of pecuniary value to special interests, those favored interests then to support by pecuniary aid the party controlling the Government. This is corruption organized on a national scale.

A democracy working through universal suffrage cannot have too many conservative influences of high authority to guide popular sentiments and to protect it against misleading seductions. In this Republic the highest conservative influence consists in the traditional veneration by the people of the principles which justified our existence as an independent nation, and of the ideals for the gradual realization of which the Republic was founded. In the same measure that we lose this conservative influence of that tradition, the Republic will become a prey to disorderly passions, unprincipled greed and reckless demagogy.

The idea that a nation in its dealings with other nations is not bound by the moral code recognized between man and man, is in the highest degree dangerous to a democracy, because it insidiously confuses the popular conscience as to moral standards or obligations in all things.

Worship of wealth, of force, of power or of mere success, whether right or wrong, is in a democracy one of the most malignant distempers of the popular mind—one of the most prolific sources of anti-democratic tendencies.