Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/392

368 two countries once concluded it will henceforth put upon any refusal to submit to arbitration any difference between them a burden of odium too heavy for any civilized nation to bear. This victory of peace is won.

There is another great victory with which Mr. Cleveland's name is nobly identified. He was a civil service reformer, not as a theorist, but as a practical administrator. He knew from practical experience that public office, to be treated as a public trust, must cease to be party spoil, and that a department of the public service, to be a business department, must cease to be a patronage department. He knew also that offices would not cease to be treated as party spoil so long as they were filled by partisan favor, and that public departments would not cease to be patronage departments so long as they had patronage to bestow. He had learned this as Mayor of Buffalo and as Governor of New York, and he found in the competitive merit system the simple, honest, practical remedy. When he became President the first time in 1885, he would have wiped out the spoils system at once, had he not feared by breaking too brusquely with long-established political habits, to alienate his party. He resolved therefore slowly to extend the civil service rules already in operation while humoring the Democratic politicians by conceding to them as much as he thought necessary. Such concessions, once begun, are apt to lead on beyond the original intention, and so it happened that at the end of his first term he had dissatisfied the reformers without satisfying the party politicians. Still, when he went out of office in 1889, he had added 12,000 places to those under the civil service rules.

It has already been mentioned what considerations induced him at the beginning of his second Administration to humor the politicians of his party again and to postpone what blows he meant to strike for his cherished