Carl Schurz

“ I candidly ask you, can you imagine anything more calculated to undermine the moral standing and authority not only of the Senate, but of the whole Government, aye, the stability of our institutions generally, than the refusal of the highest legislative body in the Republic to investigate strongly supported charges concerning the purchase of seats in it by rich men? ”

“ What do you think will be the effect, if you give the poor to understand that the highest political powers, the power to make laws and the power to execute them, are virtually for sale, and that the highest offices are to be no longer for the able and trustworthy and meritorious who deserve them, but for the rich who can pay for them? ”

“ However estimable a gentleman he may be in his way, his qualifications for the high station he covets are known to be such that the proposition to make him governor of Massachusetts would have been received with derision, were he not a millionaire. His case is therefore in point.
It is high time, it seems to me, that the American people, and especially those who have the peace and good order of society at heart, should give some attention to this matter. We are living in times in which the arraigning of the rich and the poor against one another is especially mischievous. ”

“ When men of wealth devote their leisure and opportunities to the study of public questions, endeavor to qualify themselves for the discharge of public trust and then seek official position for the purpose of employing their abilities for the public benefit, they may render very great service and become a blessing to the community. ”

“ The country has reason to congratulate itself upon the fact that so many young men of means and leisure have of late shown a disposition to give their abilities and time to public matters in the right spirit. ”

“ His success would not only do honor to Massachusetts, but, as an emphatic rebuke to the pretensions of millionairedom in politics, produce a very wholesome effect upon political life through out the country at a time when such an effect is much needed. ”

“ The nomination of men whose only, or whose principal, strength consists in the money they have, to State governorships, which this year, beginning with Maine, has become strikingly frequent, is of the same character. It means corruption in some way. ”

“ It ought by all means to be avoided; it ought certainly not to be provoked. There is much alarm at the appearance of anarchism, of revolutionary theories and of all sorts of tendencies subversive of social order. ”