Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/322

296 service system would at last bring more serious peril to the Republic than all the hostile guns then threatening the National capital. He was right. Have you ever calmly thought of it what our civil service system really is? It is one of the wonders of the world. Had it not gradually grown up among us, little by little, in the course of many years, so that we have become accustomed to the unique spectacle, we should scarcely be capable of believing in the possibility of its existence among people endowed with ordinary common-sense. I am sure, if, in the early days of this Republic, a public man had proposed to introduce it as a system, just as we now witness it, there would have been a universal cry to shut him up in a mad-house for the rest of his life.

Imagine, in this year of the great Centennial anniversary some of the wise Fathers of this Republic—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton—rising from their graves in order to ascertain by a tour of inspection what has become of their work in these hundred years. Of course, we would have to show them our civil service—and would it not make them stare? We would have to explain to them how, nowadays, things are managed; how, on the accession of a new President, the whole machinery of our Government is taken to pieces all at once, to be rebuilt again out of green material in a hurry; how sixty or seventy or eighty thousand officers are dismissed, without the least regard to their official merits or usefulness, simply because they do not belong to the party, to make room for a “new deal”; how several hundred thousand hungry patriots make a desperate rush for public place, to get their reward for party service; how the new President and the new Cabinet Ministers, still unused to their complicated duties, and needing time and composure to study them, are fairly swept off their feet by the stormtide of applications for office; how our Congressmen, the