Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/424

400 when at an enormous cost you prepare for war while there is not the slightest danger to your peace. What are we to think of a professed peace apostle who constantly clamors for more and more unnecessary war-ships, which look like a threat to the world instead of setting the good example of a reduction of armaments to the actual needs of the country? No wonder some European papers see in his recent action only a clever electioneering play.

President Roosevelt is an exceedingly interesting, picturesque and forcible character, who would have found a most congenial and glorious field of action at the time of the Crusades, but sometimes strangely fails to appreciate the higher moral aims of modern civilization. He is a patriotic man who has done very good service in several ways, and, being still young, is capable of doing much more in various important positions aside from the Presidency. His is a master nature, but this Republic does not want in the Presidency a master—least of all one who cannot master himself. To reëlect him, and thereby to make him understand, as he most certainly would understand it, that the American people are immensely delighted with all he has said and done under the inspiration of his strenuous tendencies, that they simply yearn to have more of it, and that to this end they put into his hand the great power of the Presidency, including the supreme command of the army and a big navy, with all the temptations and possibilities of such power, so that his ambition to regulate the world according to his notions may have full swing—this, I humbly submit, would be so hazardous a venture that clear headed and sober-minded Americans may well, for their country's sake, shrink from the risk.

The alternative is the election of the Democratic candidate, Judge Parker. I do not indulge in the slightest delusion as to the Democratic party. I know its faults