Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/393

Rh reform. The first three years he added only this and that branch of the service to the classified list, and established rules covering a part of the consular service. But on the 6th of May, 1896, he issued an order which marked an epoch. It not only added at one stroke of the pen over 40,000 places to those already classified, making the total nearly 90,000, but it established the general principle that it is the natural and normal status of persons serving under the Executive Departments of the National Government to be under the civil service rules—in other words, that it shall no longer require a special edict to put them there, but that they shall be considered and treated as being there unless excepted by special edict.

This order was the most effective blow the spoils system had ever received. It completed the work of civil service reform as to the subordinate places under the heads of Government offices, leaving in their old condition virtually only the officers to be appointed with the consent of the Senate, and the minor postmasters. These, it is to be hoped, will in the same spirit be dealt with by Mr. Cleveland's successors. But of him it may justly be said that while he has not done for the reform of the civil service all that could and should be done, he has done far more than all his predecessors together, and he will ever stand preëminent among the champions of that great cause.

But he was a reformer of the Government service in more than one sense. No man in the Presidential chair has ever battled with more devotion, energy and fearlessness for economy and rectitude in the administration of the people's business; not one has carried on the struggle against the prevailing wantonness of public expenditure and against corrupt jobs more bravely, more persistently and with more unceasing watchfulness; and not one has, in doing this, defied the prejudices of large classes of people, the powerful resentment of favored