Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/69

Rh to successful issue. An assessment of one per cent, on the annual gross receipts of your office is therefore called for, and you will please inclose that amount, without delay, to the treasurer, E. S. Rowse, in the envelope inclosed.

This assessment is made after conference with our friends at Washington, where it is confidently expected that those who receive the benefits of Federal appointments will support the machinery that sustains the party which gives them pecuniary benefit and honor. The exigencies are great, and delay or neglect will rightly be construed into unfriendliness to the Administration. We do not look for such a record from you, and you will at once see the propriety and wisdom of the earliest possible attention to the matter.

, Chairman of Committee.

&emsp; Treasurer.

That this did not come from the Administration itself may be looked upon as certain. It was probably a mere attempt to levy blackmail by threats and intimidation. But does not the Administration see what the practical political managers are capable of doing in its name?

But there are still other things which render it difficult to find in our history an instance in which the attempt to turn the civil service into a mere machinery of political coercion and moral degradation showed itself in a more repulsive form. Imagine a professed spokesman of those in power travelling from town to town, like Judge Jeffreys with his bloody assize, boisterously proclaiming to the trembling tribe of officeholders that he was the man to have their official heads cut off if they dared to transgress the rules laid down by him. Why, sir, I heard with my own ears how that gentleman, in that assumed representative capacity, with a jubilant taunt referred in a public speech to the postmaster of a small town upon whom the execution had already been performed, and who sat there listening to him. Is it a wonder, sir, that decent