Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/150

126 reform. The spoils politicians and their following hailed it with a shout of triumph. Many of them expressed the confident hope that now the beginning of the end of civil service reform had come. The general expression of public opinion through the press, even through not a few papers otherwise strongly favorable to the Administration, was a decided disapproval of the act.

This order, however, does not stand as an isolated fact. It appears rather as the outgrowth, perhaps as the culmination, of a general tendency that has in an alarming degree manifested itself under the present Administration outside of the classified service as well as within it.

Ever since the introduction of the spoils element in the Federal service, Members of Congress, Senators as well as Representatives, have sought to usurp the Constitutional function of the Executive in the making of appointments to office, and this has been one of the principal sources of demoralization in our political life. Every Administration, without distinction of party, has yielded more or less to that arrogation of Members of Congress, thus fostering the dangerous abuse. But—and here I am stating only a fact so notorious that nobody will dispute it—never have the President's Constitutional power and responsibility in selecting persons for Presidential appointments been so systematically surrendered to Senators and Congressional delegations as during the last three years; and never has that surrender so conspicuously served as an official recognition and as a practical support of boss rule in our politics.

As an illustrating instance we may regard the changes that have been made in consular positions. For a long time the commercial community has by all sorts of demonstrations and appeals endeavored to induce the Government to take that branch of the service out of politics. The Administrations preceding this have been