Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/541

 is often necessary to make little concessions in order to obtain good results of high value. …”

The somewhat unwonted, however justifiable, philosophy sustained by Mr. Schurz on this occasion did not avail to secure the triumph of the reformers. Tammany won the election, and two years later, in 1897, renewed its success and resumed control of the city.

Meanwhile the epoch-making presidential campaign of 1896 took place. The national Democratic party, so far from realizing the ideal of Schurz's Reform Club speech of 1892, repudiated Cleveland and all his works, set up a demand for the free coinage of silver and nominated William J. Bryan for the Presidency. The new leaders who came to the front with Bryan—Tillman, Altgeld and others—were unwonted figures in the national political arena, and seemed to be born of populism and socialism. In Mr. Schurz this transformed Democracy aroused, of course, only dread and repulsion. Its free-coinage dogma revived the memory and the spirit of the middle seventies, when he had fought so effectively against greenbacks and inflation. Yet he felt no enthusiasm for the candidate or the leadership under which the Republicans chose to oppose Bryanism. To follow McKinley, whose name had become the world-wide synonym for high protection, and Hanna, in whom unscrupulous political methods were already finding a cynical champion, was a hard necessity for a reformer and so-called free-trader. But Mr. Schurz met this situation, as he had met many a similar one, by a rigid adherence to the rôle of Independent. His rejection of the Democratic platform and candidate was, of course, prompt and emphatic. Demands for his assistance on the stump then came thick and fast from the Republican organizations, but these were all refused. While his health was such as to render