Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/182

158 denounces it as an aristocratic notion imported from England, and as a thoroughly un-American contrivance.

There is no better illustration of the democratic character of civil service reform than its history in England. Our opponents might read with profit, although they would read with dismay, the excellent work of our friend Mr. Dorman B. Eaton on the civil service in Great Britain. They would find that England, too, had its spoils system once, with all the characteristic attributes of tyranny, corruption and demoralization. They would find that the struggle against the spoils system there was a struggle against the abuse of the royal prerogative and the predominance of the aristocracy. They would find that England had its movement for civil service reform, and that it was a movement for honesty and economy in government, and for the rights of the citizen. They would find that the growth of civil service reform, in England went hand in hand with the decline of aristocratic influence, and with the growth of the democratic idea in government. They would find that the progress of the democratic idea there in the shape of civil service reform has banished from the service the power of influence and favoritism; that it has truly opened the public offices to the people; that it has given the poorest child of the people the right freely to compete with the son of the richest peer to show his fitness for official employment within the civil service rules, and to obtain it according to the showing; that it has vindicated the right of the best man to the best chance. They would find themselves forced to the conclusion that the spoils system, as it has grown up in this Republic in the last sixty years, is only a relapse into the corrupt and demoralizing patronage system of monarchical and aristocratic England when it was at its worst, and that civil service reform is the embodiment of the truly democratic principle there as well as here.