Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/448

424 to find that on March 23, 1897, less than nine months after the Republican party reiterated its solemn pledge, you spoke in the Senate thus:

I do not believe that life is long enough for this Senate to investigate the civil service of this Government. There is a shorter and easier way, and that is to get rid of the whole thing. I have voted against it [the civil service law] in the other house of Congress, I have voted against it in the Senate whenever opportunity offered, and what I desire is to cast my vote to blot out that statute. I stand upon the simple proposition that it is an un-American law, and that every citizen of this Republic has an equal right with every other citizen of the Republic to seek employment under the Government of the United States [as if this equality of rights were not infinitely more secure under the system of competitive examinations equally open to all, than under the system of appointment by influence], and whenever I get an opportunity, whatever the proposition may be, to vote to blot this law off the statute books, I shall so vote: and I shall take my chance with the people whom I happen to represent in part in this Chamber without reference to how it may strike the aesthetic tastes of the people of Massachusetts.

Thus it appears that you recognize the pledge of the Republican party to enforce the civil service law “honestly and thoroughly,” and to “extend it wherever practicable”; that you reserve to the Republican party the right to “interpret” this pledge; and that at the same time you urge the Republican party to redeem the pledge binding it to enforce the civil service law honestly and thoroughly, by blotting out the law altogether. It is a somewhat unpleasant question to ask, Senator, but it must be asked: Is this a position to be taken, or a game to be played, by an honest man? And I venture to suggest that it will not be a sufficient answer to this question to cry out that the person asking it is a “traitor” or a “renegade,” or even, if you please, a common felon. Nor will it be