Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/438

404 me as questionable proceedings. Those places were not put under the four-years-term rule for the very purpose of withdrawing them from periodical change. Should this very circumstance make arbitrary removals more justifiable than they would be in the case of a fixed term? Of course, I say nothing against removals for good cause. But can the mere fact that such officers were appointed for indefinite terms, be taken to furnish in itself sufficient cause for removal? In this case the repeal of the four-years-term law, for which the Civil Service Reform Association have petitioned, would make official tenure only less secure.

Excuse the length of this letter, remembering that I mean well. Again I thank you for the good things you have done and congratulate you on the golden opinions you have won. 



&emsp; I am obliged to encroach upon your time again. The writer of the enclosed letters, Mr. Wm. Means, was mayor of Cincinnati a few years ago, a Democratic “Reform Mayor,” and is, I believe, a gentleman of good standing in that community. I made his acquaintance last year when I was speaking in Ohio and went through the singular experience of finding myself vilified more atrociously than I had ever been vilified before, at the rate of about three columns a day, by the paper pretending to be in that State the principal organ of the party whose Presidential candidate I was working for. This circumstance led Mr. Means to speak to me; and thus to introduce himself at that time.

I said to him in reply to his first letter that I was not in the habit of writing to you about individual candidates