Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/325

Rh not many honest men left in our civil service. Thank heaven, there are very many, and for having kept their integrity intact we should honor them. They deserve more than ordinary credit, for, considering how well the spoils system is calculated to deaden official conscience, the thing which should surprise us most in our civil service is not that among its officers it should have developed so many rascals, but that it should have left among them so many honest men. But, while this circumstance is ever so honorable to those concerned, we must not forget that since the day when the principle “to the victors belong the spoils” was proclaimed, the number of rascals in the service as well as the extent of their rascalities have grown constantly and in most promising progression.

There are people who console themselves with the idea that the corruption we now deplore is simply to be accounted for as one of the natural consequences of our great civil war. Undoubtedly the war, with its confusion and seductive opportunities offered to the rogues a rich field of plunder, and thus stimulated all the thieving instinct there was in the country to extraordinary enterprise. But as to the civil service, the war only gave strong impulse to the vicious tendencies existing in it. Had not the spoils system already demoralized the service, the war would have developed far less corruption.

Moreover, there was plenty of corruption before our civil conflict, and neither party was exempt from it, least of all that to which the spoils system owed its origin and development. I dislike very much to hurt the feelings of our Democratic friends, since they treat me with such distinguished consideration, but my respect for historical truth compels me to say that it was a Democratic President who, for the golden rule that ability, honesty and fidelity should be the only decisive qualifications for public employment, first substituted the whims of arbitrary