Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/326

300 favoritism; first used the places of trust and responsibility as a means of partisan reward, and the power of removal as a weapon of punishment; first made the civil service a partisan engine, and thus left to us that terrible Pandora-box of evil from which so much demoralization, disaster and disgrace has come upon us. It was a Democratic baby, that spoils system, and it must be admitted that the Democratic party has very faithfully nursed it. It grew under that maternal care with all its peculiar virtues, until the last Democratic Administration just before the civil war became more arbitrary and despotic in the use of appointments and removals, as a means of partisan reward and punishment, and also more corrupt than any that had preceded it.

But my respect for historical truth compels me also to say, that the terrible legacy which in such a development of the spoils system the last Democratic Administration left behind it, has, under Republican rule, borne abundant fruit. I have deemed it my duty, on every proper occasion, unsparingly to denounce the abuses which have grown and spread under the last two Administrations. That duty remains the same. Of what I have said on this subject I have nothing to retract. Those abuses have injured the country in the opinion of mankind and alarmed the American people. Neither can those who were guilty of corrupt practices, or those who, in high places, permitted them to grow up, be excused as the mere victims of a vicious system. If the plea of temptation were always held valid as a justification of sin, there would soon be scarcely a temptation without a victim and such victims would have a pleasant time of it. No. I believe in personal responsibility. I have to admit that at no period in our history the conduct of some of those highest in power has exercised a more demoralizing and degrading influence upon all the spheres of public life below than it has within