Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/375

 had only called forth a manifestation of that original honesty, and that, if the local political leaders had believed in the original honesty of the people and courageously stood up for truth and right instead of permitting themselves to be frightened by a rascally agitation and of pusillanimously pandering to it, they would have had the same experience.

In fact, the same experience has repeated itself in the course of my political activity again and again until a late period. I have had an active part in a great many political campaigns and probably addressed as many popular meetings as any man now living; and I have always found that whenever any public question under public discussion had in it any moral element, an appeal to the moral sense of the people proved uniformly the most powerful argument. I do not, of course, mean to say that there were not at all times many persons accessible to selfish motives, and liable to yield to the seduction of the opportunity for unrighteous gain, and that such evil influences were not at times hard to overcome; but with the majority of the people, notably the “plain people”—using the term in the sense in which Abraham Lincoln was wont to use it—I found the question: “is this morally right?” to have ultimately more weight than the question: “will this be profitable?” We have, indeed, sometimes witnessed so-called “crazes” in favor of financial policies that were essentially immoral, such as the “inflation craze,” and the “silver craze” gaining an apparently almost irresistible momentum among the people. But that was not owing to a real and widespread demoralization of the popular conscience, but rather to an artful presentation of the question which covered up, disguised the moral element in it, and so deceived the unsophisticated understanding. And not to that alone, but to the cowardice of politicians of high as well as low rank who, instead of