* Colonel Ingersoll then read the following letter, of which
he was the author.
My Dear Sir:—In the olden times, during the purer days of the Republic, the motto was, "To the victors belong the spoils." The great object of civil service reform is to reverse this motto. Our people are thoroughly disgusted with machine politics, and demand politics without any machine.
In every precinct and ward there are persons going about lauding one party and crying down the other. They make it their business to attend to the affairs of the Nation. They call conventions, pass resolutions; they put notices in papers of the times and places of meetings; they select candidates for office, and then insist upon having them elected; they distribute papers and political documents; they crowd the mails with newspapers, platforms, resolutions, facts and figures, and with everything calculated to help their party and hurt the other. In short, they are the disturbers of the public peace.
They keep the community in a perpetual excitement. In the last campaign, wherever they were was turmoil. They fired cannon, carried flags, torches and transparencies; they subsidized brass bands, and shouted and hurrahed as though the world had gone insane. They were induced to do these things by the hope of success and office. Take away this hope and there will be peace once more. This thing is unendurable. The staid, the quiet and respectable people, the moderate and conservative men who always have an idea of joining the other side just to show their candor, are heartily tired of the entire performance. These gentlemen demand a rest. They are not adventurers; they have incomes; they belong to families; they have monograms and liveries. They have succeeded, and they want quiet. Growth makes a noise; development, as they call it, is nothing but disturbance. We want stability, we want political petrifaction, and we therefore demand that these meetings shall be dismissed, that these processions shall halt, that these flags shall be furled. But these things never will be stopped until we stop paying men with office for making these disturbances. You know that it has been the habit for men elected to bestow political favors upon the men who elected them. This is a crying shame. It is a kind of bribery and corruption. Men should not work with the expectation of reward and success. The frightful consequences of rewarding one's friends cannot be contemplated by a true patriot without a shudder. Exactly the opposite course is demanded by the great principle of civil service reform. There is no patriotism in working for place, for power and success. The true lover of his country is stimulated to action by the hope of defeat, and the prospect of office for his opponent. To such an extent has the pernicious system of rewarding friends for political services gone in this country, that until very lately it was difficult for a member of the defeated party to obtain a respectable office.
The result of all this is, that the country is divided, that these divisions are kept alive by these speakers, writers and convention callers. The great mission of civil service reform is not to do away with parties, but with conflicting opinion, by taking from all politicians the hope of reward. There is no other hope for peace. What do the people know about the wants of the nation? There are in every community a few quiet and respectable men, who know all about the wants of the people—gentlemen who have retired from business, who take no part in discussion and who are therefore free from prejudice. Let these men attend to our politics. They will not call conventions, except in the parlors of hotels. They will not put out our eyes with flaring torches. They will not deafen us with speeches. They will carry on a campaign without producing opposition. They will have elections but no contests. All the offices will be given to the defeated party. This of itself will insure tranquillity at the polls. No one will be deprived of the privilege of casting a ballot. When campaigns are conducted in this manner a gentleman can engage in politics with a feeling that he is protected by the great principle of civil service reform. But just so long as men persist in rewarding their friends, as they call them, just so long will our country be cursed with political parties. Nothing can be better calculated to preserve the peace than the great principle of rewarding those who have confidence enough in our institutions to keep silent while peace will sit with folded wings upon the moss-covered political stump of a ruder age. I am satisfied that to civil service reform the Republican party is indebted for the last great victory. Upon this question the enthusiasm of the people was simply unbounded. In the harvest field, the shop, the counting-room, in the church, in the saloon, in, the palace and in the hut, nothing was heard and nothing discussed except the great principle of civil service reform.
Among the most touching incidents of the campaign was to see a few old soldiers, sacred with scars, sit down, and while battles and hair-breadth escapes, and prisons of want, were utterly forgotten, discuss with tremulous lips and tearful eyes the great question of civil service reform.
During the great political contest I addressed several quite large and intelligent audiences, and no one who did not has or can have the slightest idea of the hold that civil service reform had upon the very souls of our people. Upon all other subjects the indifference was marked. I dwelt upon the glittering achievements of my party, but they were indifferent. I pictured outrages perpetrated upon our citizens, but they did not care. All this went idly by, but when I touched upon civil service reform, old men, gray-haired and strong, broke down utterly—tears fell like rain. The faces of women grew ashen with the intensity of anguish, and even little children sobbed as though their hearts would break. To one who has witnessed these affecting scenes, civil service reform is almost a sacred thing. Even the speeches delivered upon this subject in German affected to tears thousands of persons wholly unacquainted with that language. In some instances those who did not understand a word were affected even more than those who did. Surely there must be something in the subject itself, apart from the words used to explain it, that can under such circumstances lead captive the hearts of men. During the entire campaign the cry of civil service reform was heard from one end of our land to the other. The sailor nailed those words to the mast. The miner repeated them between the strokes of the pick. Mothers explained them to their children. Emigrants painted them upon their wagons. They were mingled with the reaper's song and the shout of the pioneer. Adopt this great principle and we can have quiet and lady-like campaigns, a few articles in monthly magazines, a leader or two in the "Nation," in the pictorial papers wood-cuts of the residences of the respective candidates and now and then a letter from an old Whig would constitute all the aggressive agencies of the contest. I am satisfied that this great principle secured us our victories in Florida and Louisiana, and its effect on the High Joint Commission was greater than is generally supposed. It was this that finally decided the action of the returning boards.
Cronin is the only man upon whom this great principle was an utter failure. Let it be understood that friends are not to be rewarded. Let it be settled that political services are a barrier to political preferment, and my word for it, machine politics will never be heard of again.
Yours truly,——
I do not believe in carrying civil service reform to the extent that you will not allow an officer to resign. I do not believe that that principle should be insisted upon to that degree that there would only be two ways left to get out of office—death or suicide. I believe, other things being equal, any party having any office within its gift will give that office to the man that really believes in the principles of that party, and who has worked to give those principles ultimate victory. That is human nature. The man that plows, the man that sows, and the man that cultivates, ought to be the man that reaps. But we have in this country a multitude of little places, a multitude of clerkships in Washington; and the question is whether on the incoming of a new administration, these men shall all be turned out. In the first place, they are on starvation salaries, just barely enough to keep soul and body together, and respectability on the outside; and if there is a young man in this audience, I beg of him: