We shall close this written history of the political parties of the United States by a brief statement of the present condition of affairs, as generally remarked by our own people, and by quoting the views of an interesting cotemporaneous English writer.
President Arthur’s administration has had many difficulties to contend with. The President himself is the legal successor of a beloved man, cruelly assassinated, whose well-rounded character and high abilities had won the respect even of those who defamed him in the heat of controversy, while they excited the highest admiration of those who shared his political views and thoughts. Stricken down before he had time to formulate a policy, if it was ever his intention to do so, he yet showed a proper appreciation of his high responsibilities, and had from the start won the kindly attention of the country. Gifted with the power of saying just the right thing at the right moment, and saying it with all the grace and beauty of oratory, no President was better calculated to make friends as he moved along, than Garfield. The manifestations of factional feeling which immediately preceded his assassination, but which cannot for a moment be intelligently traced to that cause, made the path of his successor far more difficult than if he had been called to the succession by the operation of natural causes. That he has met these difficulties with rare discretion, all admit, and at this writing partisan interest and dislike are content to “abide a’ wee” before beginning an assault. He has sought no changes in the Cabinet, and thus through personal and political considerations seems for the time to have surrendered a Presidential prerogative freely admitted by all who understand the wisdom of permitting an executive officer to seek the advice of friends of his own selection. Mr. Blaine and Mr. MacVeagh, among the ablest of the late President’s Cabinet, were among the most emphatic in insisting upon the earliest possible exercise of this prerogative—the latter upon its immediate exercise. Yet it has been withheld in several particulars, and the Arthur administration has sought to unite, wherever divided (and now divisions are rare), the party which called it into existence, while at the same time it has by careful management sought to check party strife at least for a time, and devoted its attention to the advancement of the material interests of the country. Appointments are fairly distributed among party friends, not divided as between factions; for such a division systematically made would disrupt any party. It would prove but an incentive to faction for the sake of a division of the spoils. No force of politics is or ought to be better understood in America than manufactured disagreements with the view to profitable compromises. Fitness, recognized ability, and adequate political service seem to constitute the reasons for Executive appointments at this time.
The Democratic party, better equipped in the National Legislature than it has been for years—with men like Hill, Bayard, Pendleton, Brown, Voorhees, Lamar and Garland in the Senate—Stephens, Randall, Hewitt, Cox, Johnson in the House—with Tilden, Thurman, Wallace and Hancock in the background—is led with rare ability, and has the advantage of escaping responsibilities incident to a majority party. It has been observed that this party is pursuing the traditional strategy of minorities in our Republic. It has partially refused a further test on the tariff issue, and is seeking a place in advance of the Republicans on refunding questions—both popular measures, as shown in all recent elections. It claims the virtue of sympathy with the Mormons by questioning the propriety of legal assaults upon the liberty of conscience, while not openly recording itself as a defender of the crime of polygamy. As a solid minority it has at least in the Senate yielded to the appeal of the States on the Pacific slope, and favored the abridgment of Chinese immigration. On this question, however, the Western Republican Senators as a rule were equally active in support of the Miller Bill, so that whatever the result, the issue can no longer be a political one in the Pacific States. The respectable support which the measure has latterly received has cast out of the struggle the Kearneys and Kallochs, and if there be demagoguery on either side, it comes in better dress than ever before.
Doubtless the parties will contest their claims to public support on their respective histories yet a while longer. Party history has served partisan purposes an average of twenty years, when with that history recollections of wars are interwoven, and the last war having been the greatest in our history, the presumption is allowable that it will be freely quoted so long as sectional or other forms of distrust are observable any where. When these recollections fail, new issues will have to be sought or accepted. In the mere search for issues the minority ought always to be the most active; but their wise appropriation, after all, depends upon the wisdom and ability of leadership. It has ever been thus, and ever will be. This is about the only political prophecy the writer is willing to risk—and in risking this he but presents a view common to all Americans who claim to be “posted” in the politics of their country.
What politicians abroad think of our “situation” is well told, though not always accurately, by a distinguished writer in the January (1882) number of “The London Quarterly Review.” From this we quote some very attractive paragraphs, and at the same time escape the necessity of descriptions and predictions generally believed to be essential in rounding off a political volume, but which are always dangerous in treating of current affairs. Speaking of the conduct of both parties on the question of Civil Service Reform, the writer says:
“What have they done to overthrow the celebrated Jacksonian precept ‘to the victors belongs the spoils?’ What, in fact, is it possible for them to do under the present system? The political laborer holds that he is worthy of his hire, and if nothing is given to him, nothing will he give in return. There are tens of thousands of offices at the bestowal of every administration, and the persons who have helped to bring that administration into power expect to receive them. ‘In Great Britain,’ once remarked the American paper which enjoys the largest circulation in the country, ‘the ruling classes have it all to themselves, and the poor man rarely or never gets a nibble at the public crib. Here we take our turn. We know that, if our political rivals have the opportunity to-day, we shall have it to-morrow. This is the philosophy of the whole thing compressed into a nutshell.’ If President Arthur were to begin to-day to distribute offices to men who were most worthy to receive them, without reference to political services, his own party would rebel, and assuredly his path would not be strewn with roses. He was himself a victim of a gross injustice perpetrated under the name of reform. He filled the important post of Collector of the Port of New York, and filled it to the entire satisfaction of the mercantile community. President Hayes did not consider General Arthur sufficiently devoted to his interests, and he removed him in favor of a confirmed wire-puller and caucus-monger, and the administration papers had the address to represent this as the outcome of an honest effort to reform the Civil Service. No one really supposed that the New York Custom House was less a political engine than it had been before. The rule of General Arthur had been, in point of fact, singularly free from jobbery and corruption, and not a breath of suspicion was ever attached to his personal character. If he had been less faithful in the discharge of his difficult duties, he would have made fewer enemies. He discovered several gross cases of fraud upon the revenue, and brought the perpetrators to justice; but the culprits were not without influence in the press, and they contrived to make the worse appear the better cause. Their view was taken at second-hand by many of the English journals, and even recently the public here were gravely assured that General Arthur represented all that was base in American politics, and moreover that he was an enemy of England, for he had been elected by the Irish vote. The authors of these foolish calumnies did not perceive that, if their statements had been correct, General Garfield, whom they so much honored, must also have been elected by the Irish vote; for he came to power on the very same ‘ticket.’ In reality, the Irish vote may be able to accomplish many things in America, but we may safely predict that it will never elect a President. General Arthur had not been many weeks in power, before he was enabled to give a remarkable proof of the injustice that had been done to him in this particular respect. The salute of the English flag at Yorktown is one of the most graceful incidents recorded in American history, and the order originated solely with the President. A man with higher character or, it may be added, of greater accomplishments and fitness for his office, never sat in the Presidential chair. His first appointments are now admitted to be better than those which were made by his predecessor for the same posts. Senator Frelinghuysen, the new Secretary of State, or Foreign Secretary, is a man of great ability, of most excellent judgment, and of the highest personal character. He stands far beyond the reach of all unworthy influences. Mr. Folger, the Secretary of the Treasury, possesses the confidence of the entire country, and the nomination of the new Attorney-General was received with universal satisfaction. All this little accords with the dark and forbidding descriptions of President Arthur which were placed before the public here on his accession to office. It is surely time that English writers became alive to the danger of accepting without question the distorted views which they find ready to their hands in the most bigoted or most malicious of American journals.
“Democrats and Republicans, then, alike profess to be in favor of a thorough reform in the Civil Service, and at the present moment there is no other very prominent question which could be used as a test for the admission of members into either party. The old issue, which no one could possibly mistake, is gone. How much the public really care for the new one, it would be a difficult point to decide. A Civil Service system, such as that which we have in England, would scarcely be suited to the “poor man,” who, as the New York paper says, thinks he has a right occasionally to ‘get a nibble at the public crib.’ If a man has worked hard to bring his party into power, he is apt, in the United States, to think that he is entitled to some ‘recognition,’ and neither he nor his friends would be well pleased if they were told that, before anything could be done for him, it would be necessary to examine him in modern languages and mathematics. Moreover, a service such as that which exists in England requires to be worked with a system of pensions; and pensions, it is held in America, are opposed to the Republican idea.[[57]] If it were not for this objection, it may be presumed that some provision would have been made for more than one of the ex-Presidents, whose circumstances placed them or their families much in need of it. President Monroe spent his last years in wretched circumstances, and died bankrupt. Mrs. Madison ‘knew what it was to want bread.’ A negro servant, who had once been a slave in the family, used furtively to give her ‘small sums’—they must have been very small—out of his own pocket. Mr. Pierce was, we believe, not far removed from indigence; and it has been stated that after Andrew Johnson left the White House, he was reduced to the necessity of following his old trade. General Grant was much more fortunate; and we have recently seen that the American people have subscribed for Mrs. Garfield a sum nearly equal to £70,000. But a pension system for Civil Servants is not likely to be adopted. Permanence in office is another principle which has found no favor with the rank and file of either party in America, although it has sometimes been introduced into party platforms for the sake of producing a good effect. The plan of ‘quick rotation’ is far more attractive to the popular sense. Divide the spoils, and divide them often. It is true that the public indignation is sometimes aroused, when too eager and rapacious a spirit is exhibited. Such a feeling was displayed in 1873, in consequence of an Act passed by Congress increasing the pay of its own members and certain officers of the Government. Each member of Congress was to receive $7,500 a year, or £1,500. The sum paid before that date, down to 1865, was $5000 a year, or £1000, and ‘mileage’ free added—that is to say, members were entitled to be paid twenty cents a mile for traveling expenses to and from Washington. This Bill soon became known as the ‘Salary Grab’ Act, and popular feeling against it was so great that it was repealed in the following Session, and the former pay was restored. As a general rule, however, the ‘spoils’ system has not been heartily condemned by the nation; if it had been so condemned, it must have fallen long ago.
“President Arthur has been admonished by his English counsellors to take heed that he follows closely in the steps of his predecessor. General Garfield was not long enough in office to give any decided indications of the policy which he intended to pursue; but, so far as he had gone, impartial observers could detect very little difference between his course of conduct in regard to patronage and that of former Presidents. He simply preferred the friends of Mr. Blaine to the friends of Mr. Conkling; but Mr. Blaine is a politician of precisely the same class as Mr. Conkling—both are men intimately versed in all the intricacies of ‘primaries,’ the ‘caucus,’ and the general working of the ‘machine.’ They are precisely the kind of men which American politics, as at present practised and understood, are adapted to produce. Mr. Conkling, however, is of more imperious a disposition than Mr. Blaine; the first disappointment or contradiction turns him from a friend into an enemy. President Garfield removed the Collector of New York—the most lucrative and most coveted post in the entire Union—and instead of nominating a friend of Mr. Conkling’s for the vacancy, he nominated a friend of Mr. Blaine’s. Now Mr. Conkling had done much to secure New York State for the Republicans, and thus gave them the victory; and he thought himself entitled to better treatment than he received. But was it in the spirit of true reform to remove the Collector, against whom no complaint had been made, merely for the purpose of creating a vacancy, and then of putting a friend of Mr. Blaine’s into it—a friend, moreover, who had been largely instrumental in securing General Garfield’s own nomination at Chicago?[[58]] Is this all that is meant, when the Reform party talk of the great changes which they desire to see carried out? Again, the new President has been fairly warned by his advisers in this country, that he must abolish every abuse, new or old, connected with the distribution of patronage. If he is to execute this commission, not one term of office, nor three terms, will be sufficient for him. Over every appointment there will inevitably arise a dispute; if a totally untried man is chosen, he will be suspected as a wolf coming in sheep’s clothing; if a well known partizan is nominated, he will be denounced as a mere tool of the leaders, and there will be another outcry against ‘machine politics.’ ‘One party or other,’ said an American journal not long ago, ‘must begin the work of administering the Government on business principles,’ and the writer admitted that the work would ‘cost salt tears to many a politician.’ The honor of making this beginning has not yet been sought for with remarkable eagerness by either party; but seems to be deemed necessary to promise that something shall be done, and the Democrats, being out of power, are naturally in the position to bid the highest. The reform will come, as we have intimated, when the people demand it; it cannot come before, for few, indeed, are the politicians in the United States who venture to trust themselves far in advance of public opinion. And even of that few, there are some who have found out, by hard experience, that there is little honor or profit to be gained by undertaking to act as pioneers.
“It is doubtless a step in advance, that both parties now admit the absolute necessity of devising measures to elevate the character of the public service, to check the progress of corruption, and to introduce a better class of men into the offices which are held under the Government. The necessity of great reforms in these respects has been avowed over and over again by most of the leading journals and influential men in the country. The most radical of the Republicans, and the most conservative of the Democrats, are of one mind on this point. Mr. Wendell Phillips, an old abolitionist and Radical, once publicly declared that Republican government in cities had been a complete failure.[[59]] An equally good Radical, the late Mr. Horace Greeley, made the following still more candid statement:—‘There are probably at no time less than twenty thousand men in this city [New York] who would readily commit a safe murder for a hundred dollars, break open a house for twenty, and take a false oath for five. Most of these are of European birth, though we have also native miscreants who are ready for any crime that will pay.’[[60]] Strong testimony against the working of the suffrage—and it must have been most unwilling testimony—was given in 1875 by a politician whose long familiarity with caucuses and ‘wire-pulling’ in every form renders him an undeniable authority. ‘Let it be widely proclaimed,’ he wrote, ‘that the experience and teachings of a republican form of government prove nothing so alarmingly suggestive of and pregnant with danger as that cheap suffrage involves and entails cheap representation.’[[61]] Another Republican, of high character, has stated that ‘the methods of politics have now become so repulsive, the corruption so open, the intrigues and personal hostilities are so shameless, that it is very difficult to engage in them without a sense of humiliation.’”[[62]]
Passing to another question, and one worthy of the most intelligent discussion, but which has never yet taken the shape of a political demand or issue in this country, this English writer says: