Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/193

Rh ignorance and mercenary motives, and thus open a wider practical field for the intellectual and moral elevation of man. I am sure that republican government can endure the examination of candidates for public office before they are intrusted with public responsibilities; and that it can endure also the exclusion of those who are intellectually and morally unfit for public station.

Republican government, it seems to me, does not depend upon an official tenure of four years. I think it will not suffer by an extension of that tenure to six or eight. I maintain that republican government will rather gain than lose, and gain immensely, by a reform which takes from the machinery of the public service its partisan character, and which will remove from our political life that most dangerous agency of corruption and demoralization which consists in partisan patronage; which will restore to political activity again all the best elements of our population, and to predominance the loftiest and most patriotic feelings of the human heart. I therefore repel that cry, as a slander upon the beneficent institutions under which we live and as an insult to the good sense of the American people.

It is said also that the country cannot be governed, that parties cannot be sustained under any but the existing system. Why, sir, such assertions are almost as old as history. There never was an absolutist, there never was a devotee of despotism, who did not strenuously affirm that if you limited the power of kings the whole world of morals and civilization would fall into chaos. If you had asked Walpole, he would have told you that it was impossible to govern England without a corruption fund. If you had asked the Duke of Wellington, he would have insisted upon it that the constitution of Great Britain would be ruined beyond redemption if you abolished the rotten boroughs. Why, have we become so imbecile as