Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/542

522 to discharge the duties of the offices to which they aspire, receive next to no consideration, and in the end the success of party candidates is esteemed a fitting occasion for congratulations and rejoicing, even when the effect is to displace efficient officers by those who are inefficient.

The elimination of partisan politics from municipal affairs would be an important and a significant reform. To the place-hunters and spoilsmen of politics it would be an official "notice to quit," and it would mean that the municipal constituency had determined that the administration of city affairs should be conducted on business principles. It would help to make it practicable to secure and retain good men in the public service.

It is not often that those gentlemen, whose services either in the Council or in the executive departments of the city government are most to be desired, will undertake to secure a nomination and election through the use of the regular party machinery. The prerequisite manipulation, and the self-abasement and humiliation, which generally attend a successful candidature, demand more patriotism and self-sacrifice than even good men ordinarily possess. It is difficult to see why any man who ought to be elected should so earnestly desire the position of councilman or alderman in the city government as to be willing to pay for it what it costs in time, money, and self-respect when it comes to him as the result of a political party nomination.

When obtained, it only offers an opportunity for appropriating to the public interests a large amount of time and gratuitous service. Its only compensation must be that which comes from a sense of having faithfully and honestly discharged a duty. This is hardly sufficiently inspiring to attract the best men to the public service.

Mr.Shorey, in the pamphlet already referred to, in discussing another topic, says: "An instance will illustrate what I mean: Last spring an educated gentleman in the First Ward had faithfully served the public interests in the City Council for six years. He was not at all anxious to continue in the public service, and very properly refused to make any personal exertion to secure a renomination. The business men of that ward, in which there is probably two hundred million dollars' worth of property, paid little or no attention to the matter, and the result was the loss of an excellent representative of the character and intelligence of the city in the Council."

This is a case directly apposite to my argument. The successor to the councilman, whose loss to the Council Mr.Shorey deprecates, was the proprietor of a miserable gvoggery, who secured the party nomination.

Experience in former discussions leads me to anticipate here an objection which may be formulated thus: "Admitting all that you urge as to the evils of party politics in municipal affairs, and also as to the desirability of such a divorce as you suggest, there still remains the fact that they can not be separated."