Page:Addresses in Memory of Carl Schurz.pdf/38



to Carl Schurz exists to-day, it exists, nay more, it lives, lives in the amended laws of his adopted country, lives in the enlightened thoughts and beliefs of Americans taught by him and those banded with him to know and cleave to the right in choosing public servants for the people's work. Thirty years ago, when he was called into the counsels of President Hayes, so much of such work as fell to civil servants was in large part entrusted to men and women chosen, not because they were fit to serve the public, but because they were fit to serve politicians, and generally because they were fit for nothing else. Our public offices were then too often asylums for incompetency and ill repute, recruited in great measure, from the failures and outcasts of creditable callings, those too weak, indolent, and vicious to hold their own in any worthy field of competition. Everywhere our politics, National, State, and Municipal, were debauched by the wide and unrebuked prevalence of a peculiarly mean and baleful form of bribery, the use of public employment to influence votes and reward party service; huge corruption funds were constantly accumulated by openly taxing the salaries of public servants for partisan use; and, as the most faithful service to the people could assure no one continued employment when partisan greed clamored for his place, so the most scandalous misconduct might be readily condoned if the culprit had “pull,” or stood well with the dominant “machine.”

It is no abuse of emphatic language to say that the general acceptance of the “spoils” theory of politics by American public opinion, in other words, our acquiescence in the doctrine that public offices are not posts of trust, but mere means of private gain, in very truth, “spoils;” and therefore that any sensible