TEN YEARS OF REFORM.

An address by George William Curtis at the Annual Meeting of the National Civil-Service Reform League, at Buffalo, Sept. 29, 1891.

When the distinguished President of the Buffalo Association invited the National League to hold its annual meeting in this city, we were sure, in accepting the invitation, not only of a generous and hospitable welcome, but we knew that we were coming to one of the holy cities of the reform faith. In the revolutionary army every state watched with profound interest the conduct of its own soldiers, and those states to-day still cherish with pride and gratitude the story of the deeds of the New York line, the Massachusetts line, the Virginia line, all of them uniting in the final triumph of the whole American line. So in our contest for reform, the contest for honest government by the people and not by pensioned politicians, the Buffalo line has been always at the front, and to the conviction, the constancy and the courage of that line, some of the noblest victories of the good cause are due. It is especially pleasant, therefore, that we should assemble in Buffalo for our tenth annual meeting not only to renew the pledge of our fidelity to reform, but to exchange congratulations upon its achievements and progress.

The formation of the League was not, as sometimes it has been pleasantly represented, a whim of amiable gentlemen who had a fancy for new fashions in politics, for spinning moonbeams and dipping water in a sieve. The spirit of reform is the instinct of order and progress and as old as government. It is the creative instinct moving upon the face of the waters. When the

Republican platform of 1884, reaffirmed in 1888, spoke of the dangers to free institutions which lurk in the power of official patronage, it did not announce a new discovery; it merely stated a historical fact. In the famous declaration of 1688 which, after consultation with his English advisers, William the Third issued upon embarking for England, he mentioned as the sixth among the thirteen particulars in which the laws of England had been set at naught by the dethroned dynasty, interference with. elections by turning out of all employment such as refused to vote as they were required; and in the Declaration of Rights drawn by Lord Somers with which the crown of England was offered to William and Mary, the seventh of the fourteen grievances mentioned was the same violation of the freedom of elections by patronage. So early and so prominently in constitutional history was the evil of patronage denounced as a great public wrong and peril.

A century later the evil instead of declining had grown to such strength that when the most ignoble of British ministers sought by the corruption of patronage to restore the supremacy of the crown, Edmund Burke raised his great voice in protest. Macaulay in a famous passage describes the excesses and the terror of this abuse in England and Webster draws a similar picture of its ravages in this country. It was sixty years ago that he said, in arraigning the Jackson administration, “As far as I know there is no civilized country on earth in which, on a change of rulers, there is such an inquisition for spoils as we have witnessed in this free republic." The evil that both described was the baldest form of political corruption. It was making booty of the public service, and Marcy, who defended the outrage, justly described a service so seized as spoils. In one country the public patronage was a bribery fund to prop the crown, in the other, to help a party. In both it was organized corruption.

It is not surprising that the passionate ardor of party spirit during a civil war which identified support of a party with the ex

istence of the government should have strengthened the tradition that extreme partisanship is the rightful condition of public employment, nor that the immense increase of such employment at the very time when this conviction was strongest should have developed at once and flagrantly the evils of an exclusively partisan civil service. The exaltation of patriotic feeling during the war is an inspiring recollection. But the reaction that always follows such exaltation was not less signal, and corruption in our politics was never felt to be so general, so vast and penetrating, as during the last quarter of a century. The formation of the League, therefore, did not announce the discovery of a new abuse, but the conviction that an old one was at once so deeply extended and so threatening as to demand constant exposure and resolute reform. The story of the progress of ten years is the evidence of the scope of that conviction and of the awakening of public opinion. There is no better place for the retrospect than this entrenched reform camp of Buffalo, over which the flags of victory fly, and in which drums are beating for further advances and the final triumph.

The National Civil Service Reform League was organized at Newport, R. I., on the 11th of August, 1881. It was the result of a conference among members of civil service reform associations that had spontaneously arisen in various parts of the country for the purpose of awakening public interest in the question, like the clubs of the Sons of Liberty among our fathers, and the antislavery societies among their children. The first act of the League was a resolution of hearty approval of the bill then pending in Congress, known as the Pendleton bill Within less than two years afterward the Civil Service law was passed in Congress by a vote in the Senate of 38 yeas to 5 nays, 33 Senators being absent, and in the House only a week later, by a vote of 155 yeas to 47 nays, 87 members not voting. In the House the bill was put upon its passage at once, the Speaker permitting only thirty minutes for debate. This swift enactment of righteous law was

due, undoubtedly, to the panic of the party of administration, a panic which saw in the disastrous result of the recent election a demand of the country for honest politics; and it was due also to the exulting belief of the party of opposition that the law would essentially weaken the dominant party by reducing its patronage. The sudden and overwhelming vote was that of a Congress of which probably the members had very little individual knowledge or conviction upon the subject. But the instinct in regard to intelligent public opinion was undoubtedly sure, and it is intelligent public opinion which always commands the future. It is fear of the same righteous sentiment, infinitely stronger than it was ten years ago, which to-day prevents the repeal of the reform law.

The passage of the law was the first great victory of the ten years of the reform movement. The second is the demonstration of the complete practicability of reform attested by the heads of the largest offices of administration in the country. In the Treasury and Navy departments, the New York Custom House and Post Office, and other important custom houses and post offices, without the least regard to the wishes or the wrath of that remarkable class of our fellow citizens, known as political bosses, it is conceded by officers, wholly beyond suspicion of party independence, that, in these chief branches of the public service, reform is perfectly practicable and the reformed system a great public benefit. And, although as yet these offices are by no means thoroughly reorganized upon reform principles, yet a quarter of the whole number of places in the public service to which the reformed methods apply are now included within those methods.

I say reformed methods and not principles, because the principle of reform is applicable to the entire public service. When under their oaths to discharge the duties of their offices to their best ability and with the divine aid, the President nominates and the Senate confirms a member of the Cabinet or a minister to England, the collector of a port or a postmaster, both the Presi