Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/337

Rh and influential men from the management of the public business, trouble and exasperate even the well-disposed.

The subject of civil service reform, which also formed a prominent feature of our platform in 1870, has attracted the attention of the people in a higher degree than ever before. That the President has adopted and promised to carry out a plan of reform proposed to him by the Civil Service Commission must by no means be taken as an indication that the cause of reform is now safe. The announcement made by the President was at first received by many of his most ostentatious partisans with a triumphant smile, as a clever flank march to checkmate those who demanded a searching inquiry into the abuses of the Government. But no sooner was the faintest beginning made of carrying that system of reform into effect, than it revealed at once a most determined and active opposition inside of the Administration party, not only to the plan of reform proposed by the Commission, which may, indeed, be considered liable to criticism and capable of great improvement—but to any reform of the civil service calculated to do away with that most prolific source of corruption and demoralization, the patronage. Attempts may be looked for to discredit the cause of civil service reform by the difficulties and failures which may attend the examination of candidates now to be instituted and by holding up before the people the idea of reform in every shape as a demonstrated impracticability and mischievous delusion.

It is not improbable that in the political contests now before us a trick will be resorted to which is not unknown among the contrivances of parties to secure popular support the trick of opening a prospect of reform through one influence, and the defeat of that reform through another, for the purpose of catching reformers and spoilsmen in one net. It is the duty of the true friends of civil