It was, however, soon evident that the war had made the necessity of reform imperative, and chiefly for two reasons: first, the enormous increase of patronage, and second, the fact that circumstances had largely identified a party name with patriotism. The great and radical evil of the spoils system was carefully fostered by the apparent absolute necessity to the public welfare of making political opinion and sympathy a condition of appointment to the smallest place. It is since the war, therefore, that the evil has run riot and that its consequences have been fully revealed. Those consequences are now familiar, and I shall not describe them. It is enough that the most patriotic and intelligent Americans and the most competent foreign observers agree that the direct and logical results of that system are the dangerous confusion of the executive and legislative powers of the Government; the conversion of politics into mere place-hunting; the extension of the mischief to State and county and city administration, and the consequent degradation of the national character; the practical disfranchisement of the people wherever the system is most powerful; and the perversion of a republic of equal citizens into a despotism of venal politicians. These are the greatest dangers that can threaten a republic, and they are due to the practice of treating the vast system of minor public places which are wholly ministerial, and whose duties are the same under every party administration, not as public trusts, but as party perquisites. The English-speaking race has a grim sense of humor, and the absurdity of transacting the public business of a great nation in a way which would ruin both the trade and the character of a small huckster, of proceeding upon the theory—for such is the theory of the spoils system—that a man should be put in charge of a locomotive because he holds certain views of original sin, or because he polishes boots nimbly with his tongue—it is a folly so stupendous and grotesque that when it is fully perceived by the shrewd mother-wit of the Yankee it will be laughed indignantly and contemptuously away. But the laugh must have the method, and the indignation the form, of law; and now that the public mind is aroused to the true nature and tendency of the spoils system is the time to consider the practicable legal remedy for them.

The whole system of appointments in the Civil Service proceeds from the President, and in regard to his action the intention of the Constitution is indisputable. It is that the President shall appoint solely upon public considerations, and that the officer appointed shall serve as long as he discharges his duty faithfully. This is shown in Mr. Jefferson's familiar phrase in his reply to the remonstrance of the merchants of New Haven against the removal of the collector of that port. Mr. Jefferson asserted that Mr. Adams had purposely appointed in the last moments of his administration officers whose designation he should have left to his successor. Alluding to these appointments, he says: "I shall correct the procedure, and that done, return with joy to that state of things when the only question concerning a candidate shall be, Is he honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?" Mr. Jefferson here recognizes that these had been the considerations which had usually determined appointments; and Mr. Madison, in the debate upon the President's sole power of removal, declared that if a President should remove an officer for any reason not connected with efficient service he would be impeached. Reform, therefore, is merely a return to the principle and purpose of the Constitution and to the practice of the early administrations.

What more is necessary, then, for reform than that the President should return to that practice? As all places in the Civil Service are filled either by his direct nomination or by officers whom he appoints, why has not any President ample constitutional authority to effect at any moment a complete and thorough reform? The answer is simple. He has the power. He has always had it. A President has only to do as Washington did, and all his successors have only to do likewise, and reform would be complete. Every President has but to refuse to remove non-political officers for political or personal reasons; to appoint only those whom he knows to be competent; to renominate, as Monroe and John Quincy Adams did, every faithful officer whose commission expires, and to require the heads of departments and all inferior appointing officers to conform to this practice, and the work would be done. This is apparently a short and easy and constitutional method of reform, requiring no further legislation or scheme of procedure. But why has no President adopted it? For the same reason that the best of Popes does not reform the abuses of his Church. For the same reason that a leaf goes over Niagara. It is because the opposing forces are overpowering. The same high officer of the government to whom I have alluded said to me as we drove upon the Heights of Washington, "Do you mean that I ought not to appoint my subordinates for whom I am responsible?" I answered: "I mean that you do not appoint them now; I mean that if, when we return to the capital, you hear that your chief subordinate is dead, you will not appoint his successor. You will have to choose among the men urged upon you by certain powerful politicians. Undoubtedly you ought to appoint the man whom you believe to be the most fit. But you do not and can not. If you could or did appoint such men only, and that were the rule of your department and of the service, there would be no need of reform." And he could not deny it. There was no law to prevent his selection of the best man. Indeed, the law assumed that he would do it. The Constitution intended that he should do it. But when I reminded him that there were forces beyond the law that paralyzed the intention of the Constitution, and which would inevitably compel him to accept the choice of others, he said no more.

It is easy to assert that the reform of the Civil Service is an executive reform. So it is. But the Executive alone cannot accomplish it.

The abuses are now completely and aggressively organized, and the sturdiest President would quail before them. The President who should undertake, single-handed, to deal with the complication of administrative evils known as the Spoils System would find his party leaders in Congress and their retainers throughout the country arrayed against him; the proposal to disregard traditions and practices which are regarded as essential to the very existence and effectiveness of party organization would be stigmatized as treachery, and the President himself would be covered with odium as a traitor. The air would hum with denunciation. The measures he should favor, the appointments he might make, the recommendations of his secretaries, would be opposed and imperilled, and the success of his administration would be endangered. A President who should alone undertake thoroughly to reform the evil must feel it to be the vital and paramount issue, and must be willing to hazard everything for its success. He must have the absolute faith and the indomitable will of Luther. "Here stand I; I can no other." How can we expect a President whom this system elects to devote himself to its destruction? General Grant, elected by a spontaneous patriotic impulse, fresh from the regulated order of military life and new to politics and politicians, saw the reason and the necessity of reform. The hero of a victorious war, at the height of his popularity, his party in undisputed and seemingly indisputable supremacy, made the attempt. Congress, good-naturedly tolerating what it considered his whim of inexperience, granted money to try an experiment. The adverse pressure was tremendous. "I am used to pressure," said the soldier. So he was, but not to this pressure. He was driven by unknown and incalculable currents. He was enveloped in whirlwinds of sophistry, scorn, and incredulity. He who upon his own line had fought it out all summer to victory, upon a line absolutely new and unknown was naturally bewildered and dismayed. So Wellington had drawn the lines of victory on the Spanish Peninsula and had saved Europe at Waterloo. But even Wellington at Waterloo could not be also Sir Robert Peel at Westminster. Even Wellington, who had overthrown Napoleon in the field, could not also be the parliamentary hero who for the welfare of his country would dare to risk the overthrow of his party.

When at last President Grant said, "If Congress adjourns without positive legislation on Civil Service reform, I shall regard such action as a disapproval of the system and shall abandon it," it was, indeed, a surrender, but it was the surrender of a champion who had honestly mistaken both the nature and the strength of the adversary and his own power of endurance.

It is not, then, reasonable, under the conditions of our Government and in the actual situation, to expect a President to go much faster or much further than public opinion. But executive action can aid most effectively the development and movement of that opinion, and the most decisive reform measures that the present administration might take would be undoubtedly supported by a powerful public sentiment. The educative results of resolute executive action, however limited and incomplete in scope, have been shown in the two great public offices of which I have spoken, the New York custom-house and the New York post-office. For nearly three years the entire practicability of reform has been demonstrated in those offices, and solely by the direction of the President. The value of such demonstrations, due to the Executive will alone, carried into effect by thoroughly trained and interested subordinates, cannot be overestimated. But when they depend upon the will of a transient officer and not upon a strong public conviction, they are seeds that have no depth of soil. A vital and enduring reform in administrative methods, although it be but a return to the constitutional intention, can be accomplished only by the commanding impulse of public opinion. Permanence is secured by law, not by individual pleasure. But in this country law is only formulated public opinion. Reform of the Civil Service does not contemplate an invasion of the constitutional prerogative of the President and the Senate, nor does it propose to change the Constitution by statute. The whole system of the Civil Service proceeds, as I said, from the President, and the object of the reform movement is to enable him to fulfil the intention of the Constitution by revealing to him the desire of the country through the action of its authorized representatives. When the ground-swell of public opinion lifts Congress from the rocks, the President will gladly float with it into the deep water of wise and patriotic action. The President, indeed, has never been the chief sinner in the Spoils System, although he has been the chief agent. Even President Jackson yielded to party pressure as much as to his own convictions. President Harrison sincerely wished to stay the flood, but it swept him away. President Grant doubtfully and with good intentions tested the pressure before yielding. President Hayes, with sturdy independence, adhered inflexibly to a few points, but his party chiefs cursed and derided him. President Garfield,—God bless and restore him!—frankly declares permanent and effective reform to be impossible without the consent of Congress. When, therefore, Congress obeys a commanding public opinion, and reflects it in legislation, it will restore to the President the untrammelled exercise of his ample constitutional powers according to the constitutional intention; and the practical question of reform is, How shall this be brought about?

Now, it is easy to kill weeds if we can destroy their roots, and it is not difficult to determine what the principle of reform legislation should be if we can agree upon the source of the abuses to be reformed. May they not have a common origin? In fact, are they not all bound together as parts of one system? The Representative in Congress, for instance, does not ask whether the interests of the public service require this removal or that appointment, but whether, directly or indirectly, either will best serve his own interests. The Senator acts from the same motives. The President, in turn, balances between the personal interests of leading politicians—President, Senators, and Representatives all wishing to pay for personal service and to conciliate personal influence. So also the party labor required of the place-holder, the task of carrying caucuses, of defeating one man and electing another, as may be ordered, the payment of the assessment levied upon his salary—all these are the price of the place. They are the taxes paid by him as conditions of receiving a personal favor. Thus the abuses have a common source, whatever may be the plea for the system from which they spring. Whether it be urged that the system is essential to party organization, or that the desire for place is a laudable political ambition, or that the Spoils System is a logical development of our political philosophy, or that new brooms sweep clean, or that any other system is un-American—whatever the form of the plea for the abuse, the conclusion is always the same, that the minor places in the Civil Service are not public trusts, but rewards and prizes for personal and political favorites.

The root of the complex evil, then, is personal favoritism. This produces congressional dictation, senatorial usurpation, arbitrary removals, interference in elections, political assessments, and all the consequent corruption, degradation, and danger that experience has disclosed. The method of reform, therefore, must be a plan of selection for appointment which makes favoritism impossible. The general feeling undoubtedly is that this can be accomplished by a fixed limited term. But the terms of most of the offices to which the President and the Senate appoint, and upon which the myriad minor places in the service depend, have been fixed and limited for sixty years, yet it is during that very period that the chief evils of personal patronage have appeared. The law of 1820, which limited the term of important revenue offices to four years, and which was afterwards extended to other offices, was intended, as John Quincy Adams tells us, to promote the election to the presidency of Mr. Crawford, who was then Secretary of the Treasury. The law was drawn by Mr. Crawford himself, and it was introduced into the Senate by one of his devoted partisans. It placed the whole body of executive financial officers at the mercy of the Secretary of the Treasury and of a majority of the Senate, and its design, as Mr. Adams says, "was to secure for Mr. Crawford the influence of all the incumbents in office, at the peril of displacement, and of five or ten times an equal number of ravenous office-seekers, eager to supplant them." This is the very substance of the Spoils System, intentionally introduced by a fixed limitation of term in place of the constitutional tenure of efficient service; and it was so far successful that it made the custom-house officers, district attorneys, marshals, registers of the land-office, receivers of public money, and even paymasters in the army, notoriously active partisans of Mr. Crawford. Mr. Benton says that the four-years' law merely made the dismissal of faithful officers easier, because the expiration of the term was regarded as "the creation of a vacancy to be filled by new appointments." A fixed limited term for the chief offices has not destroyed or modified personal influence, but, on the contrary, it has fostered universal servility and loss of self-respect, because reappointment depends, not upon official fidelity and efficiency, but upon personal influence and favor. To fix by law the terms of places dependent upon such offices would be like an attempt to cure hydrophobia by the bite of a mad dog. The incumbent would be always busy keeping his influence in repair to secure reappointment, and the applicant would be equally busy in seeking such influence to procure the place, and as the fixed terms would be constantly expiring, the eager and angry intrigue and contest of influence would be as endless as it is now. This certainly would not be reform.

But would not reform be secured by adding to a fixed limited term the safeguard of removal for cause only? Removal for cause alone means, of course, removal for legitimate cause, such as dishonesty, negligence, or incapacity. But who shall decide that such cause exists? This must be determined either by the responsible superior officer or by some other authority. But if left to some other authority the right of counsel and the forms of a court would be invoked; the whole legal machinery of mandamuses, injunctions, certioraris, and the rules of evidence would be put in play to keep an incompetent clerk at his desk or a sleepy watchman on his beat. Cause for the removal of a letter-carrier in the post-office or of an accountant in the custom-house would be presented with all the pomp of impeachment and established like a high crime and misdemeanor. Thus every clerk in every office would have a kind of vested interest in his place because, however careless, slovenly, or troublesome he might be, he could be displaced only by an elaborate and doubtful legal process. Moreover, if the head of a bureau or a collector, or a postmaster were obliged to prove negligence, or insolence, or incompetency against a clerk as he would prove theft, there would be no removals from the public service except for crimes of which the penal law takes cognizance. Consequently, removal would be always and justly regarded as a stigma upon character, and a man removed from a position in a public office would be virtually branded as a convicted criminal. Removal for cause, therefore, if the cause were to be decided by any authority but that of the responsible superior officer, instead of improving, would swiftly and enormously enhance the cost, and ruin the efficiency, of the public service, by destroying subordination, and making every lazy and worthless member of it twice as careless and incompetent as he is now.