The New York Times/1900/9/13/Mr. Schurz's Surrejoinder

MR. SCHURZ'S SURREJOINDER.

Mr. Gage would be happier and Mr. Schurz less jubilant if that interview of July 15 had been altogether suppressed. It is exceedingly awkward to be publicly exhibited as saying on Aug. 25 that direful things would happen which on July 15 you had said could not happen at all. Indeed, one of the handiest ways of flooring an adversary is to confront him with his own words in deadly parallel columns, making him confute himself and destroy his own arguments. It tickles the crowd, for the crowd is not a close observer, and commonly jumps to the conclusion that the deadly parallel is really deadly, and so has its laugh at the expense of the discomfited disputant.

All the same, Mr. Schurz's neat use of the parallel will in no wise reassure voters who fear that Mr. Bryan will keep his word and use his power to bedevil the currency and destroy or seriously impair the National credit. He does not even discredit Secretary Gage's warning of Aug. 25, for on examination it appears that so far as the operations of the Treasury are concerned Mr. Gage said precisely the same thing on July 15 that he said on Aug. 25. In the latter statement he said that Mr. Bryan could and probably would order his Secretary of the Treasury to pay the coin obligations and current expenses of the Government in silver; and although the present stock of Treasury silver is small, the time would come, “with a good deal of perverse ingenuity,” when gold would no longer be paid to the Government, but all its revenues would be in silver, which it would then be compelled to use for its disbursements. There would thus be established, he pointed out, a chain of silver payments from the Treasury to the people and from the people through the banks and the Custom House back into the Treasury. But in the interview of July 15 he plainly showed that this might happen. If he held bonds, he said in that interview, and Mr. Bryan should cause the interest to be paid to him in silver, he should deposit the silver in his bank and draw his check against it precisely as he would do had the interest been paid by a Sub-Treasury check. Here we have the substantive part, the real meat and meaning of the two statements, and they are seen to be in perfect agreement. To be sure, Mr. Schurz convicts the Secretary of uttering a note of comfort in July and a note of warning in August. We are not concerned to extricate Mr. Gage from any trouble in which this inconsistency may involve him. He did say in July that he thought the gold standard would be maintained, even under Mr. Bryan; and in August that he feared Bryan would practically put the country on a silver basis. We believe his later utterance is right, and warranted by the facts. “The party stands where it did in 1896 on the money question,” said Mr. Bryan at Zanesville, Ohio, on Sept. 4. He told where it stood in 1896 when he said at Knoxville, on Sept. 16 of that year: “If there is any one who believes the gold standard is a good thing I warn him not to cast his vote for me, because I promise him it will not be maintained in this country longer than I am able to get rid of it.”

The fatal weakness of Mr. Schurz's position is that he is willing to take the awful risk of intrusting the preservation of the gold standard to a man who declares that he will destroy it at the earliest possible moment. Unless Mr. Schurz believes Bryan to be an impostor he must admit that if he should find the power to destroy the gold standard he would forthwith destroy it. That power he might, in four years, find put into his hands. Mr. Schurz recklessly trusts the country's credit and prosperity to the sound-money majority in the Senate for the next two years. The people remember that a President serves four years. He thinks also to nullify Mr. Gage's word of warning by insisting that the Republican Congress, after Bryan's election and before his inauguration, can easily fix up the Gold Standard act so that it will be beyond the power of Mr. Bryan to change the standard. We do not think such a preposterous argument was ever before used in serious political controversy. He virtually asks Mr. Gage to say to the people, “You may go ahead and elect Bryan if you like him better than you like McKinley, and you need have no fear about the gold standard. We will take care of that in the short session of Congress.”

Intelligent voters are not influenced by such arguments. They are absurd. We doubt whether they are not immoral. In relation to private conduct the analogous argument would be plainly immoral. A pastor could not say to one of his flock: “Go and sin awhile; I will look out that your immortal soul is not lost.” The Directors of a bank could not look each other in the face and say, “Come, let us elect a Wall Street ‘plunger’ President of this bank; the cashier will see to it that he doesn't get at the funds.”

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