Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/178

154 public offices must cease to be regarded as political patronage and be treated in the truest sense as public trusts; the civil service rules, recognized as efficacious, must be extended to all the branches of the service to which they are applicable, and the principles of civil service reform, recognized to be correct, applied to all appointments, whether they can formally come under the rules or not. Nothing could be plainer.

We may, therefore, reasonably expect that President Cleveland, who now has the benefit of a larger knowledge of men and things than during his first term, will exert his whole power to do what the Administration which preceded him promised but failed to do—extend the civil service rules to all branches of the service to which they are applicable, and cause the spirit and purpose of civil service reform to be observed in all executive appointments. It is especially to be hoped that, as to executive appointments and removals, a beginning may be made with the 65,000 fourth-class postmasters; that the sweeping changes in this branch of the public service formerly customary may yield to civilized methods, and that the savage spectacle of the quadrennial postmasters massacre may forever disappear, to be remembered only as a relic of barbarism which strangely survived among the freest people on earth, down to the last decade of the nineteenth century.

When a President announces his firm determination to stop this savagery without fear or favor, and to be governed only by the public interest in making such changes in any branch of the service as may be necessary, it will probably no longer be difficult to carry through Congress a law regulating the appointment of the minor postmasters upon sound civil service principles. Then the superstition that every branch of the administrative machinery must be manned with adherents to the party in power will