Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/152

132 he could obtain more. He saw a chance to be appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to another government, and, sure enough, he received the nomination for that also. Then his nomination came into the Senate and was rejected. There was a terrible disappointment! And yet the man to be provided for was provided for. He was finally sent as governor to a territory. Thus, sir, under the present intelligent system of making appointments, the same man aspired to a post-office, a pension agency, a Minister residentship, a full mission, and finally landed in the governorship of a territory; and the appointing power, yielding to the peculiar pressure characteristic of the existing system, declared him fit for all these places consecutively. And all this in seven days, save the territorial governorship, which was discovered for him afterward.

And with him there were a multitude of men to be provided for at the same time; there always are a good many more than places to put them in. Do you complain of the unnecessary multiplication of offices? That evil is unavoidable as long as we suffer under the system which recognizes men to be provided for. Must it not be clear to every observing mind that our present mode of making appointments is a blindfold game, a mere haphazard proceeding? Was Mr. Lincoln very wrong when once, in a moment of despair, he said with grim humor, “I have discovered a good way of providing officers for this Government: put all the names of the applicants into one pepper-box and all the offices into another, and then shake the two, and make appointments just as the names and the offices happen to drop out together”?

Now, sir, you, as enlightened citizen of the world, observing these things, find this rather a wild way in which the affairs of this great Republic are carried on at Washington. You are somewhat bewildered, and you