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 was Mr. McKinley seated in the executive chair than a countless swarm of Republican spoils seekers swept down upon him, struggling to force the barrier of the classified service. Had that swarm consisted only of—pardon the vulgarism—the “deadbeats” hanging around the Republican camp as they hang around every other, or of members of Congress driven to mad despair by the pitiless persecution of hungry supporters insisting upon their reward, the spectacle might have been regarded as a mere after-play of the old barbarism which has brought so much humiliation and shame to our patriotic pride, but is gradually to pass away. But of more sinister portent was it when President McKinley was waited upon by a delegation pretending to come from the “League of Republican Clubs” in whose name they demanded that the President should forthwith rescind the executive order by which his predecessor had enlarged the scope of the civil service law, and that he should thus open again the places covered by that order to appointment by favor, that is, to the invasion of spoils politics.

It is worth while to contemplate that scene. There stood the President of this great republic with the solemn vow honestly and thoroughly to enforce the civil service law and, wherever practicable, to extend it—with that vow still warm on his lips; and, facing him a group of persons pretending to represent a great organization “embracing the young and active men of the party,” coolly insisting that this President should by one of his first official acts break and dishonor his party's and his own pledge and thus before the American people and all the world declare his party to be a cheat and himself a dishonest man. Did it not occur to those persons that in approaching the President with such a request and in professing to think him capable of so disgraceful an act, they offered him just as deadly an insult as if they had asked him to forge a bank check or to embezzle a trust fund, with the expectation that he would do it? Did not one of them feel that after so outrageous an affront the President would have been justified in treating them as persons not to be recognized as gentlemen, and as base slanderers in falsely pretending to represent the young men of the Republican party? Could they forget that if it really were true that the young men of the Republican party can be inspired to strenuous effort only by the prospect