Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/412

392 will naturally aim to merit and secure the approbation of the entire people, but especially of the eminently wise and good.

As to the machinery of boards of examiners, etc., whereby the details of civil service reform are to be matured and perfected, I defer to the judgment of a Congress unperverted by the adulterous commerce in legislation and appointments, which I have already exposed and reprehended. Up to this time our experience of the doings of boards in this direction has not been encouraging; and this, I am confident, is not the fault of the gentlemen who have tried to serve the public as commissioners. In so far as they may have failed, the causes of their ill-success must be extrinsic. Had they been accorded a fairer field, I am sure they would have wrought to better purpose. A thinker has observed that the spirit in which we work is the chief matter; and we can never achieve civil service reform until the interests which demand shall be more potent in our public counsels than those which resist even while seeming to favor it. That this consummation is not distant, I fervently trust; meantime I thank you for your earnest and effective labors to this end. 



I deem it my duty to give an account of my public conduct, the motives which have governed it and the ends it is intended to subserve. I can do this in no better way than by expressing fully and frankly my views on the events which have produced the present extraordinary situation of our public National affairs—events in which I took a small part—and also to state what I consider it my duty as a patriotic citizen to do, in order to promote the interests of the public. It has been my misfortune to displease many with whom I coöperated on the political
 * —Standing before my constituents,