Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/173

Rh is called “dirty work,” and their presence will create it where they do not find it.

The periodic recurrence of a “new deal” of the spoils has created a greed for office which is raging like an epidemic disease and is continually growing worse. There is a desire, unfortunately spreading among the young men of the country, to live either without work or with as little work as possible, and that desire is stimulated to a morbid degree by the seductive opportunities of political life. Many good men, young and old, are drawn off from honest and remunerative labor, because they are told that it is so easy to get an office and so pleasant to enjoy a living at the public expense. A political proletariat is forming itself in consequence, which is recruited from men who, following that morbid infatuation, are drawn away from productive pursuits. That proletariat is pressing upon candidates, not infrequently forming their bodyguard. The most reckless politicians become very important in the fight, voluntarily undertaking the work which sometimes candidates would shrink from advising. And these men will be the most clamorous for reward; and being the most persistent and the most dangerous, they will not infrequently be also the most likely to receive it. Thus a class of camp-followers, caring for nothing but the spoils, fastens itself upon political parties.

You ask, why cannot political parties preserve their purity? Mainly because the spoils system attracts to them, and makes prominent and important in them, impure elements. On the other hand, men of a higher tone, disgusted with this spectacle, will sometimes fall to the rear; and thus we deplore the loss of some of the most valuable elements of the population from active political life.

Now, sir, the Presidential election being over, the same spectacle, as I have described it, is repeated, whatever party may have carried the day. Another question