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 Curtis 
 "Party and Patronage"
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT
 
 PARTY and PATRONAGE" 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 PREPARED FOR THE ANNUAL MEETING OF 
 
 The National Civil-Service Reform League 
 
 (APRIL 28, 1892.) 
 
 BY THE PRESIDENT 
 
 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE 
 
 NATIONAL CIVIL-SERVICE REFORM Lm.u*JE 
 1892
 
 
 PRESS OK 
 
 ( ,i ,,,. Goi rSBl RG1 i Pi ' !■ 
 I i MURRAY ST., N V.
 
 ■A 
 
 
 PARTY AND PATRONAGE. 
 
 An Address at the Annual Meeting of the National Civil- 
 Service Reform League in Baltimore, April 28, 1892. 
 
 By George William Curtis. 
 
 If Charles Lamb had been an American by birth, as he is 
 certainly an American by affectionate literary adoption, he would 
 have added probably to his list of Popular Fallacies the pleasing 
 delusion that a republic is a self-adjusting system of liberty and 
 equal rights, and that to upset a throne is to set up justice. When 
 Voltaire was insulted by the London mob for being a French- 
 man, an offence which John Bright said is forgiven by John Bull 
 only with the greatest reluctance, the Frenchman turned upon the 
 steps as he entered the door, and, with exquisite sarcasm, appealed 
 to the nobleness of the English character, and complimented the 
 mob upon their institutions and love of liberty. Voltaire knew 
 that in England the surest appeal was to the national self-com- 
 placency, a virtue which is not wanting to the English-speaking 
 race wherever it is found. 
 
 But although we may justly claim that a republic, upon the 
 whole, secures fairer play for every man than any other govern- 
 ment, it is not necessary, as in a disputed election, to claim every- 
 thing. However it may be in Maryland, in New York the 
 establishment of a republic by our fathers, while it has secured a 
 fairer general chance for all men, lias not yet developed universal 
 political virtue or absolutely honest government. Like all excel- 
 
 103M?
 
 lent human devices, the administration of government must be 
 constantly and carefully repaired and improved. If a locomotive 
 upon a railroad must be watched with incessant care and be 
 scrupulously oiled and burnished, in order effectively to do its 
 work; if even a chronometer must be regularly wound, if it is to 
 report accurately the time of day ; if a slight derangement of the 
 machinery brings the huge, humming factory to silence, it is a 
 fond delusion that popular forms of government alone will secure 
 honest and equitable administration. 
 
 In the nineteenth year of our constitutional union Fulton 
 essayed with steam to force his little vessel, the Clermont, up the 
 Hudson River to Albany. It was an experiment in mechanics, 
 but no more an experiment than the republic in politics. Inces- 
 sant care, comprehensive observation, intelligence, discretion, 
 shrewd modification of details, perpetual deference to the hints of 
 experience, a thoughtful care which has not yet ceased, all these 
 have developed Fulton's struggling, doubtful Clermont, pushing 
 its way upon a smooth stream to Albany in thirty-two hours, into 
 the magnificent marine palace that crosses the turbulent ocean in 
 five times thirty-two hours. Much more was necessary to this 
 marvellous development than the invention of the steam engine 
 and the application of steam to navigation. Very much more is 
 necessary to honest government, to the security of liberty, the 
 equality of rights, and the general welfare, than a republican form 
 of government. Among the Zulus to-day a republic would hardly 
 prosper. In Bourbonized France a hundred years ago a republic 
 was a saturnalia of wrong and blood. Wendell Phillips, seeing 
 only the cause and the result, the inhuman tyranny that produced 
 the French revolution, and the relaxed grasp of despotism that fol- 
 lowed it. (ailed it " the most unstained and wholly perfect blessing 
 Europe has had in modern times." However that may be from 
 the orator's point of view, the French republic of 1793, the 
 fierce outbreak of a people imbruted by unspeakable oppression, 
 was itself an awful revenge in kind. Even great as is the prog-
 
 ress and marvellous the recuperative force of the French people, 
 and fair their future prospect, the republic is built upon volcanic 
 ground, and may yet reel with earthquake shocks. 
 
 Mont Blanc, the sovereign Alp, has not a charm to stay the 
 morning star, and the American republic, greatest and best of all 
 republics, has no more power than the Roman republic by its 
 name alone to secure freedom and wise progress. It is but an 
 instrument, and its beneficent efficiency depends upon the intelli- 
 gence, character and conscience of the people who wield it, and 
 upon the promptitude and skill with which it is kept in repair and 
 adjusted to the changing conditions of its operations. The de- 
 mand of reform in methods of administration of government, 
 therefore, is not revolutionary, nor Quixotic, nor surprising. It 
 is the sign of a healthy and progressive political life. It is not 
 exceptional, but, on the contrary, it is familiar in every kind of 
 human activity. It is the impulse of the instinct which constantly 
 seeks something better, 
 
 " The desire of the moth for the star, 
 Of the night for the morrow ;" 
 
 the instinct which stimulates medical science to the discovery of 
 more certain relief for the physical pain and suffering of man- 
 kind, which produces endless mechanical inventions, increases 
 the knowledge of occult forces and their practical application to 
 human convenience, arrests the vast and needless waste of vital- 
 ity that lesser knowledge cannot stay ; which lightens labor and 
 lengthens life by greater command of time and space. 
 
 Why should this beneficent inspiration be lost to the sphere 
 of politics which is not a less universal concern than all these ? 
 When human ingenuity is busily improving sewing machines and 
 type-writers, steam engines, telephones and electric lights, and 
 every mechanical and industrial process, why should methods of 
 administration and government not be supposed susceptible of
 
 Improvement? As the Arabian Nights and the old fairy stories 
 arc lmt delightful prophecies of our modern world of larger intelli- 
 gence and shrewder wit, where we are wafted from place to place 
 upon an enchanted carpet and in a chair of magic, where Ispahan 
 converses with Istamboul, and a drop of elixir deadens pain, so 
 Plato's republic, and Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and Harring- 
 ton's ( )( eana, and all the ideal commonwealths of the poets and 
 philosophers are but vague forecasts of states not further from 
 ours than ours from those of early history. 
 
 Yet the world is not a garden of the Hesperides where we 
 have only to raise our hands and pluck the golden fruit of prog- 
 ress. Progress, on the contrary, is everywhere the Golden Fleece 
 to be won only by hard contention, by taming fire breathing bulls 
 of stupidity, by slaying dragons of malignity, and by victoriousl) 
 withstanding hosts of slanderers and liars sprung from the teeth 
 of venomous serpents. If the application of the humane disco's 
 cries of science and the advance of the comfort and convenience 
 of modern civilization have been resisted as stoutly as if they were 
 a pestilence or a consuming cloud of locusts, it is not surprising 
 that every political reform is ridiculed as visionary and denounced 
 as incendiary. This has been so universally the welcome of im- 
 provement in every department of human interest that it may be 
 said almost that the presumption is in favor of every proposed 
 reform, and that reputed quacks and tiresome fanatics are prob- 
 ably new Columbuses and Galileos and Jenners, the latest bene- 
 factors of mankind. It is this jealous distrust of progress which 
 led so sagacious a statesman as Lord Shelburne to say : "The 
 moment the independence of America is agreed to by our gov- 
 ernment the sun of Great Britian is set. and we shall no longer be 
 a powerful or respectable people," and even Richard Henry Lee 
 < ailed the framers of the Ameri< an Constitution " visionary young 
 men." These gentlemen were very positive, but it was only their 
 rhetorii al way of saying ■• here is a change," and change to cer- 
 tain conservative temperaments means only mischief. But the
 
 challenge of conservatism to the spirit of progress has this ad- 
 vantage, that it compels every change to prove its right by show- 
 ing its reason. 
 
 The uncertain fortune of reform in politics, fluctuating be- 
 tween sudden success and long delay, is well explained by a re- 
 mark of Fisher Ames that " the only constant agent in political 
 affairs are the passions of men ; " and by what Gardiner, the latest 
 and masterly historian of the great civil war in England, says of 
 the Presbyterianism of Prynne, that it enlisted on the side of the? 
 average intellect of the day, " which looked with suspicion on 
 ideas not yet stamped with the mint mark of custom, the feeling 
 which unconsciously exists in the majority of mankind of repug- 
 nance against all who aim at higher thinking or purer living than 
 are deemed sufficient by their contemporaries, and who usually, in 
 the opinion of their contemporaries, contrive to miss their aim." 
 But existing order consists always of ideas which are stamped 
 with the mint mark of custom, and the hope of progress, there- 
 fore, lies in the ideas which are not yet authenticated at the mint. 
 The Bourbon despotism is France, the Stuart abuses in England, 
 the supremacy of the Crown in Colonial American, had the mint 
 mark of custom. Had no other coinage been demanded these 
 coined abuses would have remained the sole currency. Political 
 progress, and with it larger liberty and higher general welfare, are 
 secured only by bringing fresh bullion to be stamped with the 
 mint mark. In the ever-spreading tree of political life it is dis- 
 trust of the established order, not acquiescence in it, which is the 
 irritation of the stem that shows the spot where the new growth 
 will spring. 
 
 Progress in the legal security of liberty has been always ef- 
 fected by regulating the executive power which is the final force 
 in all politically organized communities. The Great Charter, the 
 Grand Remonstrance, the Petition of Right in England, were 
 all declarations against the arbitrary exercise of executive 
 power, and steadily diminished by jealous popular care, this
 
 s 
 
 power gradually became mainly the arbitrary control of patronage. 
 For this arbitrary control the English tory has always a plausible 
 plea, and in the middle of the last century when England had 
 been freshly reminded by Culloden and the romantic enthusiasm 
 for Prime Charles that the Hanoverian throne was not yet secure, 
 David Hume in his essay upon the Independency of Parliaments, 
 made a better argument for patronage under the British Constitu- 
 tion than could ever be made for it under ours. It was essential, 
 he said, to the balance of the constitution. The House of Com- 
 mons did not assert its supremacy over the other branches of the 
 government only because it did not think it its interest to do 
 so. The patronage of the crown, he said, with the aid of honest 
 members alone maintained the royal power. That is to say, 
 the King bought votes enough to supplement the votes of his 
 friends. " We may call this influence," he says, for Hume was an 
 honest man, "by the invidious appellations of corruption and de- 
 pendence, but some degree and some kind of it are inseparable 
 from the very nature of the constitution, and necessary to the 
 preservation of our mixed government." 
 
 Mr. Lecky points out the coincidence of Hume's view with 
 that of Paley, who attributes the loss of the American colonies to 
 the want of royal patronage extensive enough, as he says, " to coun- 
 teract that restless, arrogating spirit which in popular assemblies, 
 when left to itself, will never brook an authority that checks and 
 interferes with its own." This is the tribute of the moral Philosopher 
 to the necessity and reasonableness of the spoils system, a tribute 
 which is echoed in the political gossip according to Tammany Hall 
 as recently set forth under the name of the eminent political 
 moralist, Mr. Richard Croker, in the A r orth American Review, 
 a plea, I may add, which was promptly and thoroughly exposed 
 by our friend and associate, Mr. Dorman B. Eaton. 
 
 Our fathers were largely children of the Englishmen who 
 with great gyves of reform bound the royal prerogative; and the 
 American Declaration of Independence in legitimate succession
 
 from Magna Charta and the Grand Remonstrance was an arraign- 
 ment of the abuse of executive power. Our Colonial politics 
 were in large part a contest over patronage between the royal 
 governors and the colonial legislatures, The destruction of the 
 statue of George the Third in the Bowling Green at New York, 
 at the beginning of the Revolution, was symbolic of the instinc- 
 tive distrust of executive power by the colonists. The crown was 
 the emblem of executive oppression, and when the Republic be- 
 gan in the formation of the first state constitution during the 
 revolution the chief distinction of those constitutions was at the at- 
 tempted restraint of that power by distribution between the Leg- 
 islature or the Council and the Governor. With the same jeal- 
 ousy the framers of the Constitution in establishing the National 
 Government limited the executive power of appointment. They 
 provided that only with the advice and consent of the Senate 
 should the President appoint certain specified officers, while Con- 
 gress should provide at its pleasure for the appointment of others. 
 The Constitution thus reserves to the Senate a practical veto upon 
 the appointing power and to Congress the designation of the 
 methods of appointment of all inferior officers. 
 
 The people had assumed their own government, but as they 
 could not administer it directly it was administered by agents se- 
 lected by party or the organized majority, but under such restric- 
 tion as the whole body of voters, or the people, might impose. 
 The crown had vanished. There was no king or permanent 
 executive. There were a President and Legislature elected by 
 the people for limited terms. But the practical agency of the gov- 
 ernment was party and whoever might be elected President, party 
 remained in the administration as permanent as a king and with 
 the same control of the executive power. But the executive power 
 whether in the hands of a king or a party does not change its na- 
 ture. It seeks its own aggrandizement and cannot safely be trusted. 
 Buckle says that no man is wise enough and strong enough to be 
 vested with absolute authority. It fires his brain and maddens
 
 him. But this which is true of an individual is not less true of an 
 aggregate of individuals or a party. A party or a majority needs 
 watching as much as a king. Indeed, that such distrust is the 
 lard of Democracy against Despotism is a truth as old as 
 Demosthenes. Like a sleuth hound distrust must follow execu- 
 tive power however it may double and whatever form it may as- 
 sume. It is as ninth the safeguard of popular right against the 
 will of a party as against the prerogative of a king. Distrust is, 
 in fact, the instinct of enlightened political sagacity which sees 
 
 the peril of popular institutions lies in the abuse of the forms 
 of popular government. The great common place of our politi- 
 cal speech, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, i<= fundament- 
 als true. It is a scripture essential to political salvation. The 
 demand for civil service reform is the cry of that eternal vigilance 
 ill further restriction by the people of the delegated executive 
 power. 
 
 Civil Service Reform, therefore, is but another successive step 
 in the development of liberty under law. It is not eccentric nor 
 revolutionary. It is a logical measure of political progress. In the 
 light of larger experience and adjusted to the exigencies of a repub- 
 lic in the nineteenth century instead of a monarchy in the thirteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries, in the spirit of the wise jealousy of the 
 
 titution, in the interest of free institutions and of honest gov- 
 ernment, it proposes to restrict still further the executive power 
 as <-\'-r« ised by party. It is a measure based upon the observation 
 of a century during which government by party has developed 
 condition and tendencies and perils which could not have been 
 
 en in detail, although at the beginning of party government 
 under the constitution, Washington said of party spirit " it exists 
 under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, con- 
 trolled or repressed; but in those of popular form, it is seen in its 
 greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy." 
 
 The experience of an enturyhas justified Washington's words. 
 The superstition of divine right has passed from a king to a party,
 
 and the old fiction of the law in monarchy that the king can do 
 no wrong has become the practical faith of great multitudes 
 in this republic in regard to party. Armed with the arbitrary 
 power of patronage party overbears the free expression of the 
 popular will and entrenches itself in illicit power. It makes the 
 whole civil service a drilled and disciplined army whose living de- 
 pends upon carrying elections at any cost for the party which con- 
 trols it. Patronage has but to capture the local primary meeting 
 and it commands the whole party organization. Every member 
 of the party must submit or renounce his party allegiance, and 
 with it the gratification of his political ambition, and such is the 
 malign force of party spirit that in what seems to him a desperate 
 alternative he often supports men whom he distrusts and methods 
 which he despises lest his party should be defeated. He takes 
 practically the position that party loyality requires him to support 
 one party with bad measures and unfit candidates rather than risk 
 the success of another party with good measures and suitable 
 men. 
 
 This devotion of party, not to the ends for which it exists but 
 to the spoils that accompany success at the polls, has become 
 so absolute that it has produced an evil greater than any which 
 party proposes to remedy. In order to secure and maintain party 
 power, a corruption has been introduced which involves not only 
 the whole system of our politics, but the character of the people. 
 It is a corruption so general and so familiar that an amendment 
 to the constitution is proposed in Congress, which contemplates 
 the election of Senators of the United States by the popular vote 
 of the State instead of the vote of the Legislature, and the argument 
 gravely urged for the amendment is that it is harder to corrupt the 
 whole people than to buy a legislature. Familiar incidents of the 
 last Presidential campaign, the collection of an immense sum of 
 money by party managers to be spent without audit or accounting 
 of any kind, and the general public conviction that it was a simple 
 corruption fund not only spent for illicit purposes, but by which high
 
 office was bought, and the equally general conviction that if the 
 other party could have procured the same sum of money it would 
 have done the same thing, show how wide-spread the evil has 
 become. 
 
 A New York morning paper of the highest character recently 
 published the remark of a conspicuous politician whose name was 
 given, that, "two-fifths of the Democratic voters of the State are 
 represented in conventions by delegates selected by the heads of 
 the various departments in New York and King's County," that 
 is to say in the cities of New York and Brooklyn. An evening 
 paper of the same day, speaking of the Republican nomination 
 for the Governorship in Rhode Island, said, " it is notorious in 
 the State that every Republican candidate must pay for his honor, 
 and the price has heretofore ranged from $20,000 to $40,000. 
 * * * It has frequently happened that a second assessment 
 has been necessary when the election by the people has failed and 
 the choice has fallen upon the Legislature." These statements are 
 not disputed and they are not doubted. They are read languidly 
 by many readers as illustrations of the rottenness of politics. 
 They are read with alarm by many others as signs of a taint that 
 will rot the whole system if not extirpated. The wrong is not pe- 
 culiar to any party, for its source is the party spirit which all 
 parties stimulate and Washington foresaw. The Pot indeed sol- 
 emnly rebukes the Kettle, but when traders in mules denounce 
 traders in blocks of five for political corruption, Ave instinctively 
 recall the legendary Roman augurs and the stage direction in 
 Robert the Devil, " infernal laughter." 
 
 This monstrous development of the party system in a Repub- 
 lic while it might have been vaguely anticipated could not have 
 been definitely forseen. The American who had served under 
 ington in the field and had voted for him as President, al- 
 though he may have seen in the malice of the oposition news- 
 p ipers the addex tongue of faction, would have smiled to hear the 
 suggestion that in Republican America, the party proscriptions
 
 13 
 
 and excesses of Athens and Rome and Florence, without the 
 slaughter, might be revived and repeated. Still less would it oc- 
 cur to him that a Civil Service which a century ago in the whole 
 Union included only two hundred and nine post-masters and a 
 handful of other officers, whose tenure was their fidelity and 
 efficiency, would suddenly rise like the Afrite from the casket in 
 the Arabian tale, into a gigantic and towering form, but still the 
 supple slave of reckless party power. The increase of population, 
 the vast alien addition to the native stock, the universal extension 
 of male adult suffrage, the growth of* great cities of heterogene- 
 ous citizenship, the opening of enormous opportunities of contracts 
 and political money making, the vast consolidations of capital not 
 hesitating to attempt for their purposes the bribery of legislatures, 
 the paralysis of the national conscience for a generation in the 
 defense by a great political party of a huge moral wrong, and 
 finally a long and relentless civil war, — all these were yet to come, 
 and their relation to an enormous increase of public patronage, 
 and their influence upon the party system, could not be fore- 
 told. 
 
 These results, however, are now evident. What our fathers 
 could not guess, we can see. Party which is properly simply the 
 organization of citizens who agree in their views of public policy to 
 secure the enactment of their views in law, has become what is well 
 called a machine, which controls the political action of millions of 
 citizens who vote for candidates that the machine selects and for 
 measures which the machine dictates or approves. Servility to 
 party takes the place of individual independence of action. So 
 completely does it consume political manhood that like men sud- 
 denly hurried from their warm beds into the night air, shivering 
 and chattering in the cold, even intelligent citizens who have pro- 
 tested against their party machine as fraudulent and false, and an 
 organized misrepresentation of the party conviction and will, declare 
 that if their protest against the power of fraud and corruption does 
 not avail and the party commands them to yield, they will bow
 
 14 
 
 the head and bend the knee in loyalty to fraud and corruption. 
 The despotism of the machine is so absolute and the triumph of 
 the party so supersedes the reason and person of the party, that 
 we have now readied a point in oiur political development, when 
 upon the most vital and pressing public questions parties do not 
 even know their own opinions, and factions of the same party 
 wrangle fiercely to determine by a majority what the party thinks 
 and proposes. Meanwhile so completely has the conception of 
 party, as merely a convenient but clumsy agent to promote cer- 
 tain public objects, disappeared, that one of the chief journals of 
 the country recently remarked, with entire gravity, that it found 
 " no fault with conscientious independence in politics," which was 
 like announcing with lofty forbearance that as a philosophic mor- 
 alist, it found no fault with truth telling or honest dealing. 
 
 The recent vivid and detailed picture of political corruption 
 in Maryland, which we owe to the distinguished President of the 
 Maryland Civil Service Reform Association, one of the earliest, 
 most steadfast, and most effective advocates of reform, and its 
 companion piece depicting political corruption in Pennsylvania 
 by our devoted and undaunted friend of political reform, Mr. 
 Herbert Welsh, whom ravaged Indians bless, show how com- 
 pletely in two great States the two great parties of the country by 
 base and dishonest methods pervert their power from promoting 
 the public benefit to fostering their own aggrandizement. I am 
 not forgetting Burke's apothegm that we cannot draw an indict- 
 ment against a nation. I am not arraigning the individual citizens 
 who compose the great parties as guilty of bribery or corruption. 
 As individuals they deprecate and denounce them. But as parti- 
 sans they sustain the bribers and corrupters. The drivers of the 
 machine are necessarily few, but they are also the drivers of the 
 party, and substantially they are the party. The individual parti- 
 al! for* ed to excuse himself can only say that it is a bad business, 
 but that his party ma< hine is no worse than the other. This was 
 the plea "i Thaddeus Stevens, the leader of his party in the House
 
 »5 
 
 of Representatives, who is said to have asked in a contested elec- 
 tion case, " which is our damned rascal ? " in order that he might 
 vote for the right wrong. So far as the mere fact is concerned, 
 however, the plea that the other machine is equally bad is un- 
 doubtedly sound. When Theodore Parker delivered his tremen- 
 dous discourse on Daniel Webster, to which Rums Choate's 
 eulogy at Dartmouth College was the magnificent but pathetically 
 futile reply, a fervent admirer of Webster declared, energetically, 
 that Parker's discourse was the most outrageous deliverance he 
 had ever heard, " and the worst of it is," he said, " that it is true." 
 When the supporter of one party machine defends himself with 
 the rueful apology that the other party machine is quite as bad, 
 the worst of it is that it is true. 
 
 If I am telling the truth, it is plain that when the control of 
 patronage passed from royal prerogative to popular party, the 
 spirit and purpose of its exercise did not substantially change. A 
 hundred years ago in England the king bought votes in Parlia- 
 ment; to-day in America party buys votes atthepolls. The party 
 system has subjected thte citizen to the machine, and its first great 
 resource is the bribery fund of patronage. It is the skilful annual 
 expenditure of sixty millions of public money in the national 
 arena, and by that of thirty millions in the municipal contests of 
 New York alone, not by educational arguments and appeals to 
 reason, that the machine or the managers of parties attempt to se- 
 cure or maintain their ascendancy. Tammany Hall defends itself 
 as Hume defended the king. The plea of both is the same. The 
 king must maintain the crown against the parliament, and he can 
 do it only by corruption, said Hume. Party is necessary, says 
 Tammany, but party organization can be made effective only by 
 workers. Workers must be paid, and the patronage of the gov- 
 ernment, that is to say the emolument of place, is the natural fund 
 for such payment. This is the simple plea of the spoils system. 
 It places every party on a wholly venal basis. Under its control 
 party is no longer a combination of citizens for public ends; it is 

 
 i6 
 
 a trading company seeking the advantage of the leading partners. 
 It is the selfishness of the individual, not the public spirit of the 
 citizen, upon which it rests. And this view has various conse- 
 quences. 
 
 If public money may be properly given as a private reward, 
 the givers may decide upon what terms it shall be given. This is 
 frankly asserted by Tammany, and in this it speaks for every party 
 machine. It asks plainly, why should not a judge who is elected 
 by us for a term of years, with a salary of fifteen thousand dollars 
 a year, and who except for us could not be elected, pay to 
 Tammany the very moderate commission of ten thousand dollars 
 for his election, which Tammany guarantees? This is the doc- 
 trine of political assessments in the Custom House and Post Office 
 and every branch of the service. It is rent paid for the place. It 
 is tribute to the party for the personal favor of appointment. 
 " Why should not a man pay for benefits ? Why should not those 
 who are elected to well-salaried offices," asks Tammany, " pay the 
 expenses of the election ? Who are so much interested in the 
 election as its beneficiaries ? " it inquires, and it asks candidly, be- 
 cause the truth that the people ordain elections for their own bene- 
 fit and not for the private advantange of the candidates, Tammany 
 not only does not believe, but when stated does not comprehend. 
 And this view of Tammany is the view not only of each party 
 machine, but a large majority of both parties. Tammany is called 
 a gang of public robbers without political principles, an obscene 
 fungus fattening upon the political corruption engendered by a 
 
 • i ity. But it is the natural spawn of the spoils system. It 
 is the mirror in which party as now organized among us is re- 
 flected, and when party contemplates the image of that dia- 
 monded savage with his scalping knife of spoils it may well recall 
 the title of Rossetti's picture, "How they met themselves." 
 
 This sophistr\ of the spoils extends itself readily beyond 
 
 •ions and appointments and assessments in the Civil Service, 
 not only into the whole political system, but into every depart-
 
 i7 
 
 ment of the national life. It is undoubtedly true that, whether 
 there were a spoils system or not, great interests of all kinds, in 
 the pursuit of their own advantage, would always attempt to 
 bribe legislatures, and that public officers and voters would still 
 be bought at the polls. But it is not true that such attempts 
 would be made or would succeed under all circumstances. Chol- 
 era and typhus may not be wholly prevented by the wisest san- 
 itary care. But cleanly, well drained, and prudent neighborhoods 
 are much less exposed to their ravages than those which are 
 abandoned to foulness of every kind and degree. The spoils sys- 
 tem is a moral pestilence, bred of ignorance, carelessness and 
 knavery, which invites corruption as filth invites disease. A com- 
 munity which holds that a public office is a private benefit for 
 which the recipient ought to pay, or that citizens of all parties in 
 a free government may be justly taxed for the workers of a party, 
 would hardly frown upon the proposition that the beneficiary of a 
 law may properly pay for its passage. I do not say that the cases 
 are exactly parallel, but the moral laxity and blindness in the one 
 case would extend naturally and readily to the other. So long as 
 it is held that the public money may be spent by a party for its 
 own benefit, which means that in a country where party domi- 
 nance should depend upon honest preference of its policy, the 
 dominant party may properly pay sixty millions of dollars from 
 the public treasury for votes, so long it will be as impossible to 
 stem the corruption which threatens us on every side as to stay 
 the resistless plunge of Niagara. 
 
 We are approaching the third Presidential election since the 
 League was organized. Does any intelligent observer doubt that 
 the party of administration controlling the vast salary fund of the 
 Civil Service, which is practically a corruption fund, enters upon 
 the campaign with an immense but wholly illicit advantage? 
 Like every administration party, it is justly entitled to every ad- 
 vantage that arises from a wise policy, from the honest and effi- 
 cient conduct of affairs, from strict adhesion — if it has ad-
 
 i8 
 
 hered — to the promises by which it solicited public support, and 
 from the faithful fulfillment— if it has fulfilled them — of voluntary 
 executive pledges. To all these legitimate advantages the party 
 is entitled. But so far as its administration has expended sixty 
 millions of dollars in salaries with a view to the next election and 
 to the continuance of the party in power, so far it has betrayed 
 the principle of popular government, because so far it has delib- 
 erately bought party support with public money. The disposition 
 of that fund was committed to it in trust for the public welfare, and 
 every cent of it which this administration has spent to advance a 
 party interest has been spent in betrayal of a public trust. If the 
 national patronage fund were six hundred millions of dollars in- 
 stead of sixty, it is not impossible that, in the present develop- 
 ment of the party system, the party of this administration, as of 
 any other, by the shrewd expenditure of that sum might maintain 
 itself in power. But the offense is not measured by figures. The 
 abuse of a trust of sixty millions is morally as great as abuse of 
 a trust ten times as large. 
 
 It is not an abuse peculiar to this administration. There has 
 been no administration since that of John Quincy Adams which 
 has not done the same thing. It was long done amid general 
 public apathy arising from the good-natured and careless feeling 
 that it was the natural order of politics, the common law of par- 
 ties. It grew up gradually amid general ignorance of its tendencv 
 and public indifference. The spoils system may plead that, 
 although a breach of the earlier tradition in national politics, it is 
 really as old in New York and nearly as old in Pennsylvania as 
 parties themselves, and that it has grown strong in general acqui- 
 in e. But that is only to say that public evils and abuses do 
 not arrest attention and arouse organized resistance until they are 
 
 to be public perils. That is now distinctly seen, and this 
 League is the living, active, aggressive witness of the happy 
 awakening of the public mind to the fact that the prostitution of 
 
 uage to the maintenance of party power imperils liberty to
 
 J 9 
 
 day in a republic no less than the arbitrary will of a king imper- 
 illed it in a monarchy. 
 
 In appealing to public opinion to bind the executive power 
 still more closely, by restricting the license of party in the interest 
 of the whole people, we propose nothing which has not been often 
 done. The very fact that party is a convenient agency, and that 
 its disposition is to magnify its authority, is the conclusive reason 
 for vigilant observation of its conduct and for wholesome checks 
 upon its action. Party is a clever servant, like Steerforth's man 
 Littiraer in David Copperfield. But the cleverer he is the 
 more insolent, if permitted, he is likely to become, and the more 
 firmly he needs to be disciplined. Party is the servant of the 
 people, but it is so clever that it tends to become practically mas- 
 ter, and bullies the individual citizen as the clever Littimer set- 
 ting the table and stirring the fire, overpowered with awe, poor 
 little shrinking David. Those who grovel before the party as the 
 courtiers in Siam crawl on their bellies before the king, forget that 
 the people are really master and often break from their good- 
 natured indifference to teach party its place. There is, for in- 
 stance, in this country, a public opinion which has the force of 
 law that the judicial bench, the tribunal of ultimate appeal even 
 in questions of elections, whether the judges are appointed or 
 elected, shall be independent of party partiality and influence, and 
 it is a happy fact that the bench is so absolutely non-partisan that 
 the infrequent exceptions to the rule, when they occur, justly 
 startle the community as with a shock that threatens the founda- 
 tions of social order. Another illustration of this suspicion of 
 party is the condition frequently imposed by law upon the execu- 
 tive appointment of Commissions charged with important public 
 duties, that the members shall not be all drawn from one polit- 
 ical party. But the most striking illustration of a sane public sen- 
 timent which recoils from the abuse of executive power by party 
 and of the intervention of the people to correct it, is found in the 
 political history of New York, the State in which the spoils sys-
 
 tern was introduced with the rise of parties under the Constitution, 
 and which for the first twenty-five years of the century witnessed 
 the worst excesses of party tyranny. 
 
 When the State Constitution was adopted, in 1777, in order 
 to curb the executive power, a Council of appointment for all State 
 officers was elected by one house of the legislature from the mem- 
 bers of the other, of which Council the Governor was made Pres- 
 ident, with a casting vote. For some years before parties were 
 definitely organized, its function was honestly discharged to the 
 public satisfaction, and upon the true principles of the public ser- 
 vice. Political removals was practically unknown until as par- 
 ties arose under the Constitution, the Council of Appointment was 
 swiftly transferred into a clean -sweeping party machine, and for 
 the first twenty years of the century its action was merciless. In 
 1820 the Council controlled about 15,000 appointments in a State 
 where there were but 145,000 voters. A change in its party ma- 
 jority inaugurated an orgy of plunder. The public service of the 
 State after an election was looted like a Chinese city after its cap- 
 ture by barbarians. The party proscription was complete, and 
 among a healthy and vigorous people it became also intolerable. 
 The evil wrought its own cure. There was a general demand for 
 the abolition of the Council, and in 182 1 109,000 votes against 
 35,000 demanded its abolition, and the clean sweeping party ma- 
 chine was destroyed by the unanimous vote of the Constitutional 
 Convention. This was not a party victory, it was the act of the 
 people regulating the executive power by curbing the arbitrary will 
 of party. The appointing power was distributed among different 
 agen< ies, where it still remains, and as its abuse by party, although 
 gre Ltlj redu( ed, still remained under the changed form, the people 
 still further abridged it by the Civil Service Reform law of 1883, 
 a measure in direct and logical succession from Magna Charta 
 and all the greal muniments of political liberty. 
 
 This is the law, which in its limited operation is an undis- 
 puted benefit, that we would apply to every branch of the
 
 public service, National, State and Municipal, to which it is ap- 
 plicable. By restraining the arbitrary power of party we would 
 promote honest administration of the Government. But when we 
 say that our aim is honest government, we do not say that the 
 Civil Service is dishonest. It is, therefore, no reply to our de- 
 mand to allege that the percentage of loss to the Government in 
 the collection of the revenue is inconsiderable. What we affirm is 
 that the theory which regards places in the public service as 
 prizes to be distributed after an election like plunder after a bat- 
 tle, the theory which perverts public trusts into party spoils, 
 making public employment dependent upon personal favor and 
 not on proved merit, necessarily ruins the self-respect of public 
 employees, destroys the function of party in a republic, prostitutes 
 elections into a desperate strife for personal profit and degrades 
 the national character by lowering the moral tone and standard of 
 the country. 
 
 Four years ago, as the Presidential election approached, the 
 League stated in some detail the reasons for its dissatisfaction 
 with the administration of that time. It tested the administration 
 by the simple standard of reform, and all that it could say was 
 that the scope of the classified service had been somewhat en- 
 larged, and that the rules and regulations had been revised and 
 improved. It declared that the general party change in the service 
 which had followed the inauguration of the new President was 
 not demanded by the welfare of the service itself, nor by any public 
 advantage whatever, and was due solely to a partisan pressure 
 for partisan objects, which unfortunately the President had not 
 resisted. But it will not be forgotten not only that the party of 
 the President had not demanded reform, but that its controlling 
 sentiment was hostile to it. All that was done under the last ad- 
 ministration, and what was done gave the question of reform a 
 place in practical politics which it will not lose until the reform is 
 fully achieved — was done by the President alone. Except for 
 his courage and fidelity to his personal convictions, the reform
 
 22 
 
 law of 1883 would have been practically nullified, and the reform 
 ignored and discarded. Tried by the standard of absolute re- 
 form, he failed as President Grant failed ten years before, and for 
 the same reason — the hostility of his party. But tested by the 
 actual situation of to-day, notwithstanding the executive yielding 
 to party pressure, the pure flame of reform sentiment not only 
 was not extinguished during the late administration, but burned 
 more brightly in the public mind as the administration ended — 
 burned so brightly, indeed, that the opposition party, in the plat- 
 form upon which they carried the election, made the strongest 
 profession of reform faith and purpose that any party ever made. 
 
 The present administration came into power, not with the 
 usual vague platitude upon the subject, but with a definite prom- 
 ise of reform and the distinct pledge to fulfill its pledges. But it 
 celebrated the success of its party with a wild debauch of spoils 
 in which its promises and pledges were the meats and the drinks 
 that were riotously consumed. Nevertheless, the reform law has 
 been as faithfully observed as by its predecessor, and the scope of 
 the reformed service has been greatly enlarged. The Secretary 
 of the Navy, in the interest of the public, and he could have 
 done his party also no greater service, has introduced the reform 
 into the skilled and unskilled labor system of the navy yards. In 
 his late speech in Rhode Island, a carefully and skilfully prepared 
 defense of the administration and the strongest presentation of 
 its claims to public confidence that probably will be made dur- 
 ing the pending campaign, Secretary Tracy says: "I believe I 
 am justified in saying that, so far as its administration is con- 
 cerned, the navy has never been treated so little in the spirit of a 
 party question as it is to-day; the regulations of the department 
 within the last year have eradicated all political considerations 
 from the employment of navy-yard labor, and have made that 
 employment dependent alone upon the skill and efficiency of the 
 workmen."
 
 23 
 
 A more signal illustration of the practical progress of reform 
 cannot be found, and when we add to this action of a Republican 
 Secretary of the Navy the fact that a Democratic member of the 
 House of Representatives has unanimously reported from the com- 
 mittee of which he is chairman a bill to make the order of the 
 Secretary in one Department the law in all Departments of the 
 government, it is plain that the beneficent flame of reform of which 
 I spoke is in no danger of extinction. The President has also 
 somewhat extended the classified service, and has authorized open 
 voluntary competitions for promotions, while the Postmaster-Gen- 
 eral had already adopted the principle of competitive promotion 
 in his department. It is the Post Office Department, however, 
 the largest patronage branch of the government, which has been 
 ruthlessly ravaged under this administration by the old abuse. At 
 the same time, again, in the House of Representatives bills have 
 been introduced regulating the appointment of all postmasters 
 upon reform principles. 
 
 Yet while this steady advance in one of the most fundamental 
 of political reforms proceeds, the party platforms of the last year 
 have barely mentioned it, and in the hot party campaigns of the 
 autumn and of the spring, party orators have foreborne even to 
 compliment it, lest haply some vote might be lost. The explana- 
 tion of this apparent inconsistency and this evident avoidance and 
 silence, is, however, not difficult. Civil Service reform proposes 
 to restrict the arbitrary power of party. It does not, of course, 
 contemplate the dissolution of parties or suppose that popular 
 government will be carried on without the organization of citizens 
 who desire to promote public policies upon which they agree. In- 
 deed, the reform will necessarily promote the legitimate power of 
 party by making it a representative of opinion to a degree, which 
 under the spoils system, is impossible. But as party has now be- 
 come largely a machine, oiled by bribery and corruption in the 
 form of patronage and money, and as the result of elections is
 
 24 
 
 coming, in the popular belief, not to indicate the popular will, but 
 to signify merely the preponderance of "boodle" on one side or 
 the other, party machines no more favor civil service reform than 
 kings favor the restriction of the royal prerogative. 
 
 But it is by party action, nevertheless, that reform must 
 be secured. Why, then, do we anticipate success ? Because party 
 itself is finally subject to public opinion, and whatever the machine 
 may wish it is at last obliged to conform to public opinion as a 
 sailing ship to the wind. There is already a peculiarly intelligent 
 and influential reform opinion, an opinion with independent votes, 
 of which party machines are conscious, and to which they now 
 formally defer. It is an opinion which is known to public officers 
 who often share it, and, taught by official experience the practical 
 value of reform, they introduce it cautiously into their administra- 
 tion. Once planted, like a vigoroussapling,it grows apace. The uni- 
 form and undeniable excellence of the result strengthens and ex- 
 tends the reform sentiment, and still further emboldens public 
 officers to heed it. The futility of theoretical objections is shown 
 by conclusive experiment, as when the first steamship crossed the 
 ocean before Dr. Dionysus Lardner had finished demonstrating 
 that it was impossible. The wiser and more independent senti- 
 ment of party perceives the advantage to be gained by becoming 
 the instrument of reform, as the wiser Whigs forty or fifty years 
 ago strove to make their party an anti-slavery party, and, failing, 
 saw their party disappear. Undoubtedly if the Republican party, 
 born of thai failure, had proved that it meant what it said of civil 
 service reform in its recent platforms, it would enter upon the con- 
 test <>f this j 'ii a more powerful party than it is. But its platform 
 and the dr. larations of Republican leaders and its observance of 
 the reform law, like the same observance and the reform acts of 
 tin- late Democratu President, show in what way despite the 
 machines public opinion, as it strengthens, prevails, and the good
 
 25 
 
 work is done. The vigorous young sapling must encounter gales 
 and frosts and droughts, but still it grows, and swells, and bur- 
 geons. So feeling its way gradually, irregularly, inconsistently, 
 halting and stumbling, but steadily advancing, reform proceeds. 
 
 Party machines, truculent and defiant, resist, but like kings 
 they yield at last to the people. The king whose arbitrary excesses 
 produce the peremptory popular demand for relief ordains, how- 
 ever reluctantly, a restriction that limits his power. So the French 
 Bourbon, Louis the Eighteenth, signed the charter of 1814, and the 
 Prussian Hohenzollern Frederic William the Fourth, summoned 
 the Constituent Assembly of 1848. They call their surrender moiu 
 proJ>rio, an act of their sovereign will. But they know, and the 
 world knows, that it is the will of a greater sovereign than they, 
 the will of the people. Our appeal is now, as it has always been, 
 not to party, but to the people who are the masters of party. As 
 the English Barons, in the phrase of an old English writer, cut the 
 claws of John; as the English Parliament taught terribly the Eng- 
 lish king that not he, but the English people, was the sovereign ; 
 as the American colonies taught the English Parliament in turn 
 that the American people would rule America, so by every law 
 and custom demanded by public opinion, which restrains the ar- 
 bitrary abuse of executive power by party, the American people 
 are constantly teaching American parties that not the parties 
 but the people rule. We cannot expect the king, nor the Parlia- 
 ment, nor the party, to solicit the lesson or to enjoy the disci- 
 pline. We cannot expect their supple courtiers either in the pal- 
 ace or in the saloon, to demand that the king or the party shall 
 be bound. But bound nevertheless they are, bound by the peo- 
 ple they have been, and bound by the same power they will be. 
 The record of this year, as of the last year, and of every year 
 since the League was formed ; even the reiterated pledges of 
 platforms, although reiterated only to be largely broken ; the most 
 sweet voices of the stump, that sink into barren silence ; the bills
 
 26 
 
 introduced that gasp and die in committee, on the one hand ; and 
 on the other the constantly larger scope of the reformed system 
 in the public service, all reveal the ever stronger public purpose, 
 and the constantly greater achievement of that purpose, to add in 
 Civil Service Reform another golden link to the shining chain of 
 historical precedents which by wisely restraining executive powei 
 promote the public welfare.
 
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