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see our public service well performed, and who hope for the elevation of political sentiment and the purification of political methods.

These are patriotic and statesmanlike utterances. The man who pronounced them showed that he well understands the nature of the disease, and he would not permit us to doubt his honest determination to apply the remedy. It is true, his words do not distinctly promise this or that specific measure. But he points out so clearly the evil to be redressed and the end to be reached, that the adoption of efficacious means is obviously implied. If "the system which distributes public positions purely as rewards for partisan service," which debauches the suffrage and robs political action of its thoughtful and deliberative character," the system which makes it doubtful whether the Government will survive its continuance," is to be done away with, if "the demoralizing madness for spoils" is to be stemmed for the sake of the better performance of the public service and "the elevation of political sentiment and the purification of political methods," then, evidently, public offices must cease to be regarded as political patronage and be treated in the truest sense as public trusts; the Civil Service Rules, recognized as efficacious, must be extended to all the branches of the service to which they are applicable, and the principles. of Civil Service Reform, recognized to be correct, applied to all appointments, whether they can formally come under the Rules or not. Nothing could be plainer.

We may, therefore, reasonably expect that President Cleveland, who now has the benefit of a larger knowledge of men and things than during his first term, will exert his whole power to do what the Administration which preceded him promised but failed to do-extend the Civil Service Rules to all branches of the service to which they are applicable, and cause the spirit and purpose of Civil Service Reform to be observed in all executive appointments. It is especially to be hoped. that, as to Executive appointments and removals, a beginning may be made with the 65,000 fourth-class post

masters; that the sweeping changes in this branch of the public service formerly customary may yield to civilized methods, and that the savage spectacle of the quadrennial postmasters massacre may forever disappear, to be remembered only as a relic of barbarism which strangely survived among the freest people on earth, down to the last decade of the nineteenth century.

When a President announces his firm determination. to stop this savagery without fear or favor, and to be governed only by the public interest in making such changes in any branch of the service as may be necessary, it will probably no longer be difficult to carry through Congress a law regulating the appointment of the minor postmasters upon sound Civil Service principles. Then the superstition that every branch of the administrative machinery must be manned with adherents to the party in power will be thoroughly exploded, and the back of the spoils system will be broken forever. I venture to affirm that the President who gives the decisive impulse toward such a consummation will render the Republic a more lasting service, will entitle himself more to the gratitude of posterity, and will achieve greater renown for himself by this one act than he could by the most ingenious device of taxation and the most brilliant financial policy. For he will have removed an evil threatening not only our material welfare, but the very vitality of our free institutions. He will have imparted a new moral spirit to our political life, rendering infinitely easier the rational solution of the other problems hanging over us.

To doubt that President Cleveland sincerely wishes to accomplish this would be to doubt that he is an honest man. The question may be asked whether his party will not throw discouraging obstacles in his way, such as the Republican party threw in the way of President Grant and his successors, and whether he can be moved

by them from his purpose. But the Democratic party should be the last to do so, if it is to deserve the name it bears; for Civil Service Reform is, in its field, the most perfect realization of the true democratic principle.

The truest definition of democratic government is furnished by Abraham Lincoln's famous saying that it is "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" of the people, for the people constitute the sovereignty from which it springs; by the people, for the people through their chosen representatives and servants conduct it; for the people, for it is to be conducted solely for the people's benefit. The people are, therefore, evidently entitled to the best service they can get, and no interest, neither that of a political party nor that of any citizen, has a right to stand in the way. Those entrusted with the power of appointing officers are, consequently, in duty bound to regard office solely as a public trust, and to appoint only persons found fittest to give the people the best possible service.

Democratic government rests upon the principle of equal rights. It abhors privilege and favoritism. But it is privilege and favoritism upon which the spoils system rests the privilege of those in authority or of influential politicians to dispose of the public offices as their patronage, distributing that patronage by way of personal or political favor. It is justly said that the offices belong to the people and must be open to the people. Most certainly. But what does this mean? Does it mean that they must be open only to those who have influence themselves, or who have the influence of powerful politicians behind them? No; according to true Democratic principle it means that the offices must be open to all citizens according to their fitness to fill them; that they must be most open to those who are most fit to fill them; that free and equal opportunity must be furnished to all for showing who are the most fit, whether they be rich or poor, politicians or no politicians, backed by influence or not backed. Under the spoils system the offices are open only to the privileged few-those favored by the influence of the powerful. Civil Service Reform has undertaken to open the offices to all according to their ability to serve the people. The spoils system asks the candidate for office: "Does your member of Congress recommend you, or does the party boss in

your State or your county ask for your appointment? Or are you backed by a man who gives much money to our campaign fund? What men of influence have you behind you? If you have none, you can have no place." Civil Service Reform asks the candidate: "Are you a man of good character, and what can you show to prove it? What do you know? What can you do? What qualifications have you for serving the people? Have you more than other candidates for the place?" On the one side, under the spoils system, the aristocracy of influence and a very vulgar aristocracy it is-robbing the man who has only merit, unbacked by power, of his rightful chance. On the other hand, Civil Service Reform, inviting all freely to compete, and then giving the best chance to the best man, be that man ever so lowly, and be his competitor ever so great a favorite of wealth or power. On that side the aristocracy of "pull," on this the democracy of merit.

This is the true Democracy, and, as a Civil Service Reformer, I have a right to say, "I am a Democrat," Senator David B. Hill to the contrary notwithstanding. But what are you, spoilsman? You may be whatever else, but as a Democrat you are an impostor.

The spoils politician is fond of objecting that Civil Service examinations do not always point out the fittest man for the place. Perhaps not always. The best marksman does not hit the bull's-eye every time; but he misses it rarely. The Civil Service examinations may have a small record of failures. But what the system, fairly conducted, always does is to snatch public office from the undemocratic control of influence and favoritism. And there is the point which stings the spoils politician. It would trouble him little whether or not the fittest man is put in the proper field of action. That is not what he cares for. But that the reformed system so effectively repels the demoralizing touch of political favor, that it so thoroughly takes away from the office the character of spoil, that it does not tolerate public place to be a means of bribery and an article of barter-this the spoils politician will never forgive us, for it destroys his trade.

The very democracy of Civil Service Reform makes the spoilsman's heart sore with sorrow, and in the bitterness of his soul he wildly denounces it as an aristocratic notion imported from England, and as a thoroughly unAmerican contrivance.

There is no better illustration of the democratic character of Civil Service Reform than its history in England. Our opponents might read with profit, although they would read with dismay, the excellent work of our friend Mr. Dorman B. Eaton on the Civil Service in Great Britain. They would find that England, too, had its spoils system once, with all the characteristic attributes of tyranny, corruption and demoralization. They would find that the struggle against the spoils system there was a struggle against the abuse of the royal prerogative and the predominance of the aristocracy. They would find that England had its movement for Civil Service Reform, and that it was a movement for honesty and economy in government, and for the rights of the citizen. They would find that the growth of Civil Service Reform in England went hand in hand with the decline of aristocratic influence, and with the growth of the democratic idea in government. They would find that the progress of the democratic idea there in the shape of Civil Service Reform has banished from the service the power of influence and favoritism; that it has truly opened the public offices to the people; that it has given the poorest child of the people the right freely to compete with the son of the richest peer to show his fitness for official employment within the Civil Service Rules, and to obtain it according to the showing; that it has vindicated the right of the best man to the best chance. They would find themselves forced to the conclusion that the spoils system, as it has grown up in this Republic in the last sixty years, is only a relapse into the corrupt and demoralizing patronage system of monarchical and aristocratic England when it was at its worst, and that Civil Service Reform is the embodiment of the truly democratic principle there as well as here.

That it is so here as there, does that make it un-Ameri

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