Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/153

Rh extend your inquiries further, to ascertain whether the same wild way prevails everywhere else. You go to New York. You visit the customhouse; you know of the magnitude of the interests administered there; you know that the revenues of that customhouse are now far larger than were the revenues of the whole Government not a great many years ago; you notice how complicated that tremendous machinery is, teeming with weighers and gaugers and inspectors and appraisers and examiners, and clerks of all descriptions. A new collector has just been appointed to direct and control that mighty engine. He is a sort of a president on a small scale. Being a new man you find him perplexed with the greatness, variety, delicacy and responsibility of his duties; duties new to him, duties which, in their complexity, he will not be able clearly to understand, much less successfully to perform, without careful study and close application. And yet, what is he doing? The same thing which you found the President to be doing, and the members of the Cabinet; he is distributing offices. He is overwhelmed with applications. He has received in a few days about fifteen thousand of them, and the pressure of applicants and their friends bids fair to drive him crazy. He, too, is obliged to take to pieces the whole machinery of the customhouse and to reconstruct it again in a hurry. You ask him, why all this? He will tell you it is a political necessity. A political necessity, sir! Is not the first political necessity the conscientious and efficient collection of the revenue? No, sir. He will tell you that there is a political necessity far above that, of a much higher order; and you discover that the great customhouse at New York is essentially a political machine. It is to control, as much as possible, the politics of the city and State of New York in the interest of the ruling party.

Now, sir, what are the influences pressing upon that