“I hope, my ever dear and honored mother, that you are fully convinced from my letters, which you have before this received, that upon the contingency of my father’s being placed in the first magistracy I shall never give him any trouble by solicitation for office of any kind. Your late letters have repeated so many times that I shall in that case have nothing to expect, that I am afraid you have imagined it possible that I might form expectations from such an event. I had hoped that my mother knew me better; that she did me the justice to believe that I have not been so totally regardless or forgetful of the principles which my education had instilled, nor so totally destitute of a personal sense of delicacy, as to be susceptible of a wish tending in that direction.”[96]
To Jefferson’s sense of public duty John Quincy Adams added the sense of personal delicacy, both strong against such appointment of relations. To the irresistible judgment against this abuse, a recent moralist, of lofty nature, Theodore Parker, imparts new expression, when he says, “It is a dangerous and unjust practice.”[97] This is simple and monitory.
PRESIDENTIAL APOLOGIES FOR NEPOTISM.
Without the avalanche of testimony against this Presidential pretension, it is necessary only to glance at the defences sometimes set up; for such is the insensibility bred by Presidential example, that even this intolerable outrage is not without voices speaking for the President. Sometimes it is said, that, his salary being far from royal, the people will not scan closely an attempt to help relations,—which, being interpreted, means that the President may supplement the pettiness of his salary by the appointing power. Let John Adams, who did not hesitate to bestow office upon a few relations of unquestioned merit, judge this pretension. I quote his words:—
“Every public man should be honestly paid for his services.… But he should be restrained from every perquisite not known to the laws, and he should make no claims upon the gratitude of the public, nor ever confer an office within his patronage upon a son, a brother, a friend, upon pretence that he is not paid for his services by the profits of his office.”[98]
It is impossible to deny the soundness of this requirement and its completeness as an answer to one of the apologies.
Sometimes the defender is more audacious, insisting openly upon the Presidential prerogative without question, until we seem to hear in aggravated form the obnoxious cry, “To the victor belong the spoils.” I did not suppose that this old cry could be revived in any form; but since it is heard again, I choose to expose it; and here I use the language of Madison, whose mild wisdom has illumined so much of constitutional duty. In his judgment the pretension was odious, “that offices and emoluments were the spoils of victory, the personal property of the successful candidate for the Presidency”; and he adds in words not to be forgotten at this moment:—
“The principle, if avowed without the practice, or practised without the avowal, could not fail to degrade any Administration,—both together, completely so.”[99]
This is strong language. The rule in its early form could not fail to degrade any Administration. But now this degrading rule is extended, and we are told that to the President’s family belong the spoils.