THE REASON AND THE RESULT

-OF

CIVIL-SERVICE REFORM.

THIRTY-SIX years ago when Franklin Pierce was elected President the happy end of the anti-slavery agitation was announced. But ten years after the election of Pierce, Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation of emancipation. The course of American history does not depend upon Presidents but upon the people. Of that fact even the managers of nominating conventions are aware, and therefore, although they detest Civil Service reform and insist that it is extinct, I venture to predict that one of the great conventions which will soon assemble, will praise the President for his fidelity to reform and the other will denounce him as the chief of sinners against it, — each party assuming not that reform is dead, but what is perfectly true, that it is more alive than ever before. Party platforms are valuable not so much for what they say as for what they indicate. They are rag bags of an extraordinary assortment of pieces, but they are all of the texture and the colors which are believed to be popular. They would make a most crazy quilt, but they are an excellent guide to the political fashion because they are selected by very shrewd judges.

I think that nobody is more interested than we are to know the exact situation of the reform movement or to state it more accurately. Last year we told what we believed to be the truth of the

present administration, in regard to reform, as we have always sought to tell the truth of every administration and we were assured that our meeting was like a funeral feast. But we could safely reply that if the remark were true, then, in the familiar phrase, it was certainly not our funeral. Undoubtedly more had been expected of this administration than of any of its predecessors because of the frequent and friendly declarations of the President, and because his election by the votes of those who were not of his party authorized an independence of action which a President elected solely by the vote of his party might feel to be denied to him. This anticipation has been largely disappointed, but the disappointment must not make us unjust or unmindful of the fact that although the President has done much and has permitted much that every friend of reform must deplore, yet he has maintained all that had been gained in the examinations, he has extended the range of the classified service, and he has revised and strengthened the rules. Certainly this is not all that had been expected, but the general and intelligent public regret that he has done no more shows how strong is the desire of reform in the public mind.

That is the essential question in all reform movements. They are at first addressed to public opinion, and parties and administrations very slowly respond. But this slow response must not deceive us. In 1852 the Whig party, dodging the slavery question, cast 1,400,000 votes, and the anti-slavery party only 155,000. But four years later the Whig artful dodger had disappeared, and the anti-slavery sentiment, organized as the Republican party, cast more than 1,300,000 votes. Twenty years ago when Mr. Jenckes, of Rhode Island, spoke here in New York to a few persons in the chapel of the University upon reform in the

Civil Service he was like Paul in Athens declaring the unknown God. To-day there has been for six years a law of Congress embodying his views. In the White House there is a President, elected because he held those views. The press of the opposition party assails him chiefly for abandoning them, and an opposition Committee of the Senate is accumulating evidence to prove if it can that he has done even less for reform than other Presidents, and therefore ought not to be re-elected. This is hardly consonant with the theory of the death and burial of reform. Party investigating committees on the eve of elections do not trouble themselves with spent rockets. In observing the movement of public opinion against public abuses we need not be troubled because it is not uniform or universal, nor because results do not keep equal pace with eager hopes. It is not until the axe has made many and deep gashes in the trunk that the tree begins to yield. Long after the blows that will level it have begun it towers unshaken in its pride of place. Nevertheless, it is doomed. The stroke of the axe is strong and steady, ringing with cheerful music, and at last the towering tree is laid low.

The history of English liberty is the story of the restraint and regulation of patronage. When the revolution of 1688 had expelled the Stuarts and was supposed to have substituted Parliament for the prerogative, the House of Hanover sought instinctively to recover the complete prerogative by subduing Parliament, and its most powerful weapon was patronage. Its corruption was universal. Political freedom was in mortal peril. To be one of the king's friends was to be an enemy of English liberty, and Lord Chatham thanked God when he heard that

America had resisted in arms because he knew that English liberty was to be saved, as it was saved, in America.

This disgraceful and humiliating story has an unpleasantly familiar sound. Read upon the English page, we pity the subjects of a monarchy where such things were possible. We wonder that an intelligent people did not rise in wrath and sweep them away, and we complacently find in them admirable arguments for republican government. But, unhappily, while we read and wonder, and cry shame, we are looking in a mirror. It is ourselves we are flouting and scorning. "My dear sir," says Thackeray, "I remark your virtuous indignation with snobbery. Very good; you are the snob whom I am describing." There is no more ignominious chapter in the history of the English speaking race than that of the struggle of George the Third to withstand the progress of liberty by the power of patronage. But we are fast coming to see in this country that for sixty years we have been busily writing a different chapter of the same disgrace. One New York politician writes to another from Washington on the 17th of March, 1829, only a fortnight after the inauguration of General Jackson: "From the manner in which the President has exercised his power thus far I am inclined to think that he will go the whole hog." The sagacious observer was not disappointed. The swinish saturnalia had begun and it proceeded with rapidly swelling fury. We need not waste our wonder, or satire, or contemptuous scorn, upon England and George the Third. Of this shame at least England has purged herself, while there are recreant Americans who boast of it as practical politics and who are actually proud of it in its worst form as peculiarly American.

In the modest beginning of our government there was the