Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/191

Rh man will recoil before an error because it appears popular; and frequently he will find it in reality far less popular than it appeared before he resolutely attacked it. Those of us who witnessed the first beginning of the civil service reform movement might well have been discouraged by the seeming hopelessness of the undertaking. The politicians despised it as an idle dream of visionaries, and waved it aside with a sneer. The people seemed to ignore it with stolid indifference. The first practical attempt resulted in dismal failure. That public sentiment was in any degree prepared for it when the work was begun, few of us would have been sanguine enough to affirm. But that public sentiment became rapidly prepared for it as the work went on, nobody will now deny. The present danger is, not that those who have the matter practically in hand rush ahead of public sentiment, but that they lag behind it.

One by one the old fictions by which the spoils politician sought to discredit civil service reform are vanishing into thin air. Of the demagogic pretence that it is an outlandish notion imported from England, and an un-American contrivance, I have already spoken. We still hear sometimes the silly story that it will build up an officeholding aristocracy. That people should fear the growing up among us of an aristocracy of millionaires—that I can conceive. But think of an aristocracy of revenue collectors, customhouse appraisers, district attorneys and United States marshals! Imagine a nobility composed of postmasters, Indian agents and Department clerks! If there be anything like a feudal aristocracy in politics, it is that born of the spoils system—the party bosses, the machine leaders, the dealers-out of patronage—such as King Croker, Duke Murphy, Marquis Sheehan, Earl Gilroy and the sturdy barons holding fiefs and wielding power as Tammany district leaders here—a somewhat