Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/403

Rh scorned to countenance them and to associate his interests or endeavors with theirs for his party's advantage; who rather bid defiance to them, and would strain every nerve to fight and utterly annihilate their influence upon our public life—a sort of second St. George, killing the dragon of corruption and other iniquities with his mighty lance. It was, by the way, the same legendary Roosevelt who in his writings rejected the protective tariff system as unjust and injurious, and who condemned a colonial policy involving the acquisition of distant lands and alien populations to be governed by arbitrary rule as incompatible with our fundamental principles and un-American.

After his election to the governorship of New York, and, later, after his accession to the Presidency of the United States, the legendary Roosevelt appeared in strong phrase in his frequent addresses to the public. No governor, and, certainly, no President, has ever more earnestly admonished the people in numberless discourses with untiring iteration and in more emphatic language that, to be good and useful citizens, we must, above all things, conduct ourselves with “honesty, courage and good sense.” There never was a more demonstrative advocate, in speech, of that “militant honesty” which will not only carefully abstain from wrongdoing but will mercilessly denounce and stamp out dishonesty wherever it can be reached. Nobody ever condemned with holier scorn and abhorrence the self-seekers in politics, “those sinister beings who batten on the evils of our political system,” and “the corrupt politician who is the real and dangerous foe,” and that “dreadful thing which consists in condoning misconduct in a public man,” and that “shame” in our politics which “deifies mere success with out regard to the moral qualities lying behind it.”

It might surely have been expected of the man whose