demoralizing the public service were pointed out, especially by the late Judge McLean, of the Supreme Court; but, having tasted of the spoil, the ravenous capacity of office-seekers and the selfish strategy of party leaders were developed to the utmost. The Whig party, in its victory of 1840, had not the virtue—perhaps it had not the strength to take the noble position open to it, of renouncing the spoils system altogether at the moment it came into their hands. It made no attempt in that direction. The policy, having been thus followed by both parties, has become settled upon the country. Its evils have become developed even beyond the prediction of its most far-seeing opponents. Omitting those few high offices which it is conceded should be held by the tenure of general sympathy with the administration, and intending by the civil service that vast catalogue of offices with which party opinions have no proper connection, it may be now said that the tenure of the civil service is party fidelity. This were bad enough. But it is more. It is personal fidelity in the political and electioneering service of the member of Congress who procured the tenant his office, and has or may have the power to remove him. This secret power affects the families and friends of office-holders, and the underlings, the very boys that sweep out the office. The opinions of their parents are searched into, and notice is given if action, or at least silence, is required of them. The distribution of this vast patronage is well understood to be, with a few exceptions where the President or the head of the department has a strong wish, in the hands of the member of Congress of the dominant party for the district in which the office is exercised. Senators, by a perversion of their power of confirmation, exercise a vast control over all patronage, the exact lines of which, as between themselves, the heads of departments, and the members of the lower house, are imperfectly defined. The limits of senatorial intervention cannot be laid down. A common law or usage respecting the division of spoils has obtained some growth, and is to some degree respected between the members of the two houses, as to the offices within each State. It is enough to say, in general, that each office-holder through the country understands that he holds his office upon the terms, mainly and substantially, not only of party fidelity, but of active service at caucuses, conventions, and in his daily conversation and business, to promote the personal interests and aspirations of some politician

in one or the other branch of Congress. It has become a base and servile tenure, unworthy of the citizen of a free republic. It tends to lower the tone of all the holders of office and of all citizens who are the spectators of such a relation. The effect upon the members of Congress is quite as bad. It nurses a love of power over individuals. It accustoms them to look to the selfishness of men, their fears and their cupidity, as the sources of their own influence and the means of their advancement. It occupies a large portion of their time, to the exclusion of their proper public service. It leads them to believe that their re-election or promotion depends more upon the manner in which they have managed their patronage than upon the part they have taken and the labors they have performed in the service of the nation. Mr. Mundella, the radical member of Parliament for Sheffield, a strong friend of our institutions, told us, at the Cooper Institute, on taking leave of the country, that he thought its great danger lay in the corrupting effect of our civil service. It had surprised, shocked, and alarmed him. He said that, having perhaps the largest constituency in England, he had not a voice in the appointment of a tide-waiter, that in Parliament he had only to attend to the legislative and administrative duties of a member, and that his re-election depended upon the manner in which his constituents regarded his public service.

It may be said that, assuming our statements to be substantially true, they are generally accepted, and that nothing is of any value except the suggestion of some specific plan of reform. We do not believe this to be the case. The difficulty lies in the unwillingness to give up the spoils system. It is expecting a good deal of the virtue of members of Congress that they should be willing to surrender this patronage. They must be forced to it by an overruling public opinion. The great mass of men who have spent a lifetime in learning to run the political machine by the spoils system must lose the fruits of their labors, and retire to private life, and begin the unaccustomed business of earning a living by legitimate work of their own. The multitude of office-seekers through the country have always looked to this system, and will with difficulty accommodate themselves to any other. Public opinion must be created intelligent enough to know exactly where the evil lies, what it is that must be changed, and what result is to be looked for, with a moral sense sufficiently awakened to feel the moral dangers as well as the ignominy of our present situation.

If our civil service were divorced from electioneering, how great and beneficent would be the effect upon every election! Let any one ask himself, as to our Presidential elections, what portion of the excitement, expenditure of time and money, and useless and costly demonstrations, is to be attributed to the struggle for the retention of office, and for obtaining office in the civil service. What portion of the corruption and of those various demoralizing labors, known by the names of pipe-laying and log-rolling, capturing and managing of caucuses and conventions, is attributable to this system of rewards and punishments? How largely has it controlled our State and municipal elections, for no reasons affecting State or municipal policy, but only for the purpose of controlling their patronage? If this divorce can be secured, our elections will turn far more upon the pros and cons of public measures and upon the merits of candidates. The potentates of the custom-house and the post-office must dismiss their pretorian guards and corps of janissaries, paid from the public Treasury for personal services, and make room for men employed and paid, upon business principles, for the performance of the duties of their office, and none other.

If the people of the country come to a full knowledge and deep sense of the demoralizing effect of the spoils system, they will demand its abandonment and the substitution of a system by which the business of the Republic shall be intrusted to men whose tenure of office, however long or short, shall be an independent one; who need fear nothing but official misconduct or disability; who need no longer watch the smiles and tremble at the frowns of the member from the district or his electioneering agents; who need not fear the reproach of being any man's political body-servant; who may stand erect in the consciousness that they have been appointed, upon their merits, to perform certain specific public services, for a known compensation, for an established term of time, with the right to think and vote on public questions as their intelligence and conscience shall dictate.

We do not think that public opinion has acquired the force to insist upon this reform, against interests and habits so firmly established, and against the influence of the masses of our most selfish, skilful, power-loving and active politicians. We think the best service we can render, in an article like this, is rather to attempt to aid in advancing such a public opinion than by

suggesting modes and methods of carrying out such a reform, before the need of it shall have become sufficiently felt and the demand for it sufficiently strong.

Seats of Cabinet Ministers in the two Houses.

Few of those who have interested themselves in this subject seem to be aware what a revolution will be made in our entire political system by the adoption of this change. They point to England, as if members of the Cabinet there had officially seats in Parliament. But this is not so. No Cabinet minister has a seat in Parliament as such, and a member of Parliament vacates his seat by accepting a place in the Cabinet. But he may be re-elected, notwithstanding his seat in the Cabinet. The truth is, that in England the Cabinets are formed from members of Parliament. The Ministry is a kind of standing committee of the two houses, to carry on the government under their sight, subject to their daily observation, obliged to report and to explain to them in person, viva voce, all the measures of legislation and administration in which they are engaged. And whenever this committee of the two houses cannot command their support, it is unmade, and a new committee of members substituted. We state this in a rough way, as the substantial result of the condition of things in England, aware that the formalities and ceremonies give it to a common observer a somewhat different appearance. But no analogy can be drawn from the British Parliament to our Congress. Parliament governs the British Empire in administration as well as legislation, subject to no constitution and no objection to its acts by any judicial tribunal, and does all this through a Ministry which has become in fact its committee,-Parliament being all the while supreme in legislation and administration. What analogy can be drawn from that system to our own, composed of three independent departments of government, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial? If we have made a mistake in separating the legislative from the executive, and in giving the executive a tenure independent of the legislative,-in other words, in reversing the British system, we can correct it only by a reconstruction of our whole frame of government from the beginning. It is easy to see the advantages of having ministers in the two houses to explain and defend the measures of the government, but are we

prepared for the consequences? Are we willing that these ministers appointed by the President shall frame and initiate measures in Congress? Do we intend that they shall resign if they are outvoted, and that the President shall appoint a new Cabinet in harmony with the majority of Congress? If we do, what becomes of the Presidential prerogative? Will not the person chosen by the people to administer an independent executive department, with a veto power over acts of Congress, become a mere name and form; the Cabinet leader in Congress becoming the principal figure before the people; the President following his advice, as does the Queen that of her minister; and Congress, by its control over the Ministry, becoming supreme in administration as well as legislation? It may do for England to trust herself entirely to Parliament. She has done so up to this time without apprehension, or perhaps reason for any, because in that supreme council is gathered and continued for life (practically in the Commons as well as in the Lords) all that England has of political experience, public distinction, popular favor, and stake in the community, of rank, wealth, landed estate, and leading positions in trade, agriculture, and manufactures. There, too, are her eminent judges and lawyers, and all the foremost of her naval and military commanders. It is an assembly the composition of which has never been approached or likened in the world's history. The British system is absolute parliamentary government, and England must needs have in that assembly every element of wisdom the Empire can furnish, experience in all departments of public service, and the greatest stake in all the forms of wealth and industry in the country, and a membership which shall be the highest object of pride to the British subject. The fate of England depends upon the character and composition of her Parliament. We, on the other hand, have not, and have determined that we will not have, and without a radical revolution, including the destruction of the States, can never have, such an assembly. As a democratic Republic, we have trusted to the distribution of powers between the States and the Republic, and between the different departments of the government in each, and not to the concentration in one assembly of all the conservatism, political intelligence and experience, fame, éclat, and stake in the wealth and industry of the land. Indeed, it is a contradiction of terms to suppose an assembly in