Page:The Democracy of the Merit System p15.jpg

 office as a reward of their activity and that without the stimulus furnished by patronage, their useful zeal would be wanting. You answer that this may be so, but that the zeal which needs the stimulus of patronage is after all a mercenary zeal; that the mercenary element in political parties will grow the more powerful, the more it is stimulated by spoil; that the moral spirit and tone of a party organization will sink the lower, the more powerful the mercenary element in politics grows; that the pushing intrusion of that mercenary element will naturally serve to drive persons of self respect and high ideals from public life; that the patriot for revenue only is the bane of our politics and can best be spared; that if he drops out, he will only make room for a better class of men; that the spoils system has enabled persons whose statesmanship consists in distributing patronage, and hardly in anything else, to maintain themselves in public life, and to organize the so-called machine consisting of patronage mongers and place hunters; that the machine tends to make political parties wholly subservient to selfish ends, to crowd out that statesmanship which is inspired wholly by high patriotism, and to turn our political contests into sordid squabbles about personal advancement and public plunder.

In saying this you have touched a sore point; for the statesman you address is likely to be himself one of those public men whose statesmanship consists mainly in the handling of the patronage and who would be in danger of speedy extinction, were that resource of political sustenance taken from him. It is a delicate matter for him to discuss, and he therefore changes his tack and begins to impeach the efficiency of the merit system itself. He will tell you of absurd questions being asked in the examinations—how a candidate for a letter carrier's place had to give the exact number of the killed in the battle of Marathon, or a candidate for a clerkship the distance of the moon from the planet Mars, and so on. Your answer is that these ridiculous stories are simply not true—mere inventions of the enemy—and that, if the examinations have in any cases not been sufficiently practical, the obvious remedy is, not to abolish the whole merit system but to instruct the examiners to make the examination more pertinent.—He will tell you that under the civil service law only college graduates have a chance and that the whole system is,