Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/425

and shortcomings very well, and I have opposed it often. But I believe that, if put in power, under present circumstances, it can do the country a very important service, partly of a negative, partly of a positive kind. Of course, I do not expect the millennium; but I think we may well expect that it will put a stop to the strenuous pyrotechnics which for some years have distracted us, and bring the Republic back to the sober ways of conscientiously constitutional and legal government; that it will arrest the existing lavishness of public expenditures and introduce a wholesome economy into our government household; that it will thoroughly overhaul the various government departments, which is all the more necessary as the recent investigation of corrupt practices in the postal service have only scratched the surface, and as further investigations by the Republican party “in its own time and its own way” are not promising substantial results; that it will scale down our enormous and unnecessary expenditures for the army and navy to a figure answering the real needs of the country; that it will start a vigorous movement against the extortions and corruptions of our tariff system; and that it will do away with our utterly undemocratic, financially wasteful and politically demoralizing colonial policy, thus restoring to their old dignity the principles upon which this Republic was founded, and reviving the popular reverence for our great traditions which forms the conservative influence so much needed by our democracy—in short, that it will reverse in all these things the principal tendencies of the present Administration. I do not mention the gold question, for the movement against the gold standard, which practically died in the Presidential election of 1896, is now so dead that the desperate and disreputable Republican partisanship, which seeks to frighten timid people, tries in vain to give it a fictitious appearance of