Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/396

362 add that the failure of your Administration to adopt this rule and to illustrate it by keeping Mr. Pearson in place would disappoint the hopes of those of your supporters who have the success of your endeavors to reform abuses and to purify the political atmosphere most earnestly at heart. They cordially appreciate the noble resistance you have offered to the pressure of the spoils politicians, and they would be much pained at seeing that record blurred, and the cause they have in common with you compromised, by an act calculated to render uncertain, or at least more difficult, your complete success. It is generally believed, although you never made a pledge to that effect, that you went to Washington with the intention of reappointing Mr. Pearson. It was generally expected, by friend and foe, that this intention would be carried out. If now, in spite of your own inclination to do a thing so good in itself and so beneficial in its consequences, and in spite of an overwhelming sentiment in its favor among the business community here, regardless of party, and among the friends of reform throughout the country, considerations of a partisan character should after all outweigh all this, and thus maintain their ascendancy, keeping the field open for a future revival of spoils politics, the disappointment would indeed be great.

But it would be a disappointment not only to many of your friends,—the result would disappoint you too. It would greatly encourage, but by no means satisfy, the office-hunters and patronage-dealers. By encouraging them it would bring them down upon you with new expectations and more exacting demands. With these demands you would not be able to comply without giving up your whole reform policy. And by refusing them you exasperate the spoilsmen in the Democratic party just as much as by appointing hundreds of Pearsons. Nothing will satisfy them but a complete surrender. Half a