Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/434

410 public service from the curse of spoils-politics. But this was only a beginning; and with unflagging watchfulness and zeal he endeavored to fortify the positions won and to push on the advance.

Without injustice to others, whose part in the work cannot be overlooked, it may well be said that Curtis, by his wide knowledge and experience, his ripe and calm judgment, his gentle temper and his scarcely asserted but easily acknowledged authority, was most perfectly fitted for that essential task of leadership in such a cause—the task of reconciling the diversities of opinion, and of harmonizing, stimulating and directing the zeal and the efforts of others laboring for the same object. He was not only the president of the National Civil Service Reform League, reflected from year to year without any question, as a matter of course, but he was also to the day of his death, more than any other person, the intellectual head, the guiding force and the constant moral inspiration of the civil service reform movement. The addresses he delivered at the annual meetings of the League were like mile-stones in the progress of the work, and as he reported to the country what had been done and what was still to be done, and why and wherefore, enlightening the public mind and cheering on his fellow laborers, the spoils politicians had to listen with respect and wonder—unwilling perhaps—to the voice of a devotion, the perfect unselfishness of which nobody could doubt, and of a quiet energy which no obstacle and no failure could dismay, and which, slowly but steadily, drove them from one entrenchment to another.

The civil service reform movement, acting upon the public mind, without resort to any of the contrivances of party machinery, by a perfectly intellectual and moral influence, and by compelling by such means the spoils politician to surrender from his stubborn grasp one