Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/535

 dinner of the Reform Club of New York on December 10, 1892. The occasion took the character of a jubilation over the result of the election by Cleveland Democrats and Independents. The President-elect attended and made an address. Schurz followed, speaking on “Moral Forces in Politics.” To these forces he ascribed the decisive influence in the late campaign. Not the professional politician, he said, but the flouted and despised idealist had correctly gauged the feelings of the American people. The party sense had been overwhelmed by the moral sense. “What,” he asked, “are these moral forces? They are that patriotism which subordinates every other consideration to the general welfare, honor and greatness of the country; that instinct of justice which loves right as right, abhors wrong as wrong, and wishes every man to have his due; that sense of duty which incites a conscientious endeavor to understand what is best for the country and for every citizen in it; that honest purpose and courage to do what is right which inspire sympathy and respect for honest purpose and courage in others; that proud manliness which disdains shams and subterfuges, and admires with a hearty admiration a straight-forwardness defying opposition and a plucky disinterested zeal for the public good doing the best it can.” Such forces, he claimed, animated the rank and file of the Democrats to rise against the protective tariff and its trail of corrupt politics. Such forces, too, inspired the Independents—“the men who, as has been said of Edmund Burke, ‘sometimes change their front but never change their ground’; the men who, in struggling for good government, had the courage to expose themselves without the shelter of a party roof over their heads; the men whom the partisan politician calls ‘those enlightened, unselfish and patriotic citizens who rise above party,’ provided they rise above the other party, but whom he calls ‘a lot of