Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/328

302 nor as wise as those of Washington, Adams or Jefferson, but how much misfortune would have been averted, and what crop of scandal remained unsown!

One great merit General Grant's Administration may claim. It has demonstrated the vicious tendencies of our present civil service system so strongly that even the dullest mind must perceive them. We have clearly seen how that system will endanger the integrity of good men by its temptations, and stimulate bad men only to become worse. We have been forcibly made aware of the necessity not only of a change, but of a thorough and lasting change, and that such a thorough change cannot be put off much longer without danger.

We have been in the habit of speaking with pride and exultation of the vitality and recuperative power of the American people; and justly so, for a people who can endure such a civil service system as we have had for the last forty years without utter ruin, moral and National, must, indeed, have a wonderfully tough constitution or amazing good luck. As a young people, and under extraordinarily favored circumstances, we have endured it so far. But it will scarcely do to test the robustness even of the American people too severely. The most vigorous constitutions must at last sink under constant debauch. There will be one of two things: either thorough reformation, or inevitable and perhaps rapid decay. What, then, is to be done? If it is true, and I am profoundly convinced of that truth, that under the spoils system it is simply impossible to keep up a reasonably efficient and honest civil service, and that the service will grow the more corrupt the longer the spoils system exists, then nothing can be clearer than that we must have a change which is genuine—thorough reform, including the abolition of that system. What is civil service reform? Let me tell you first what civil service reform does not consist in: