CARL SCHURZ'S POLITICAL CAREER
the restoration of ancient American ideals, and of encouraging Mr. Bryan to become a triumphant champion of insular independence. The Kansas City convention gave a serious shock to his hopes. Here the Democracy, nominating Bryan, did indeed take a strong position against imperialism and did in terms pronounce this the paramount issue; but it coupled with these satisfactory declarations a formal reiteration of the extreme free-coinage doctrine of 1896; and Mr. Bryan, during the campaign, devoted to the silver question an amount and kind of attention that repelled all voters who thought the currency issue still vital.
When it was foreseen that the campaign would take this unsatisfactory course a number of efforts were made by groups of Mr. Schurz's friends to organize a respectable third-ticket movement. He followed their various enterprises with interest and sympathy, but was hardly surprised when all failed. Left to the alternative he had anticipated nearly a year before, he supported Bryan, as he had supported McKinley four years earlier, by the negative method of striving to defeat the opposing candidate. However painful and unpopular it might be, he did not hesitate. A hundredfold more wrong-doing and misfortune than he foresaw, or even feared, in regard to San Domingo and the West Indies, a generation earlier, had come to pass in the Orient. The intensity of his feeling was expressed in a letter to Charles Francis Adams: “I have carefully and laboriously studied what has happened in all its details and bearings, and that study has profoundly convinced me that the story of our attempted conquest of the Philippines is a story of deceit, false pretense, brutal treachery to friends, unconstitutional assumption of power, betrayal of the fundamental principles of our democracy, wanton sacrifice of our soldiers for an unjust cause, cruel slaughter of innocent people,
[ 446 ]
