Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/36

2 If your letter was intended to serve your chances in the election, the calculation was, I think, at fault. The voters who are going to decide this election by throwing their weight on one side or the other, are likely to be influenced by one of two currents of sentiment: one is that since the Republican party has been in power for twenty years, the time has come for a change, and this current has great strength; the other is that the administration of public affairs during the last four years having been on the whole satisfactory, it is most prudent to let well enough alone. This current may become stronger provided the next Republican Administration bids fair to be at least as good as the present. As the one or the other of these currents of feeling grows during the campaign, so the election will go. Discussion of all other topics will have little effect upon the result.

Your letter of acceptance has had the effect of strengthening the current first mentioned and to weaken the second. It is universally interpreted as opening a prospect of the reëstablishment of the party machine in the civil service, and of a return to the old system of Congressional patronage; in one word, as a reactionary movement in the direction of the worst of old abuses. It is useless to speak after this of regulating the civil service on sound principles by Congressional action, for everybody knows as well as you or I do that as long as Congressmen do not find their patronage cut off by the Executive, it will be idle to expect any Congressional legislation curtailing their enjoyment of it. And I know from four years of executive experience, that honest government is impossible with the civil service as a party machine, and the public offices used as patronage and perquisite. The intelligent public knows it just as well. But the public does not know as well as I, that if elected, your whole moral and intellectual nature will recoil from a relapse into the old abuses. The public