Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/192

168 rough nobility to be sure, but quite as enterprising as any that levied tax on unprotected merchants' wagons and upon the unwary traveller's purse in the Middle Ages. It is for the Jeffersonian Democracy to deal with this precious chivalry.

There is the other curious conceit that the spoils of office are necessary to hold political parties together, to create an interest in public affairs among the people and to give life and spirit to our political contests. Is this possible? Look at England, where, after the overthrow of one party and the coming into power of another, scarcely more than sixty offices change hands. Look at Germany, where the victory of one and the defeat of another party involve no change in the administrative machinery at all. There are no spoils there, but are there no parties? Are there no party contests stirring the popular mind to its very depth? And now, in the freest of all countries, where the people in the largest sense are called to govern themselves, where the people owe so much to their democratic institutions and are said to be so proud of them, here there should not be patriotism and public spirit enough, here it should require the sordid allurement of spoils and plunder to inspire the citizens with an active interest in their own affairs? Shame upon the slanderers who revile and blacken the American name with so infamous a charge! For it is a slander, wanton, foul and abominable. There was as much interest and ardor in our political contests as there ever has been anywhere in the world before the spoils of office were an element in American politics. There was more interest, more patriotic fervor, more self-sacrificing devotion, than anywhere and at any time in history, in the greatest political contest this country has ever seen—in the struggle for the salvation of the Union—in which hundreds of thousands freely offered their lives without any