Page:The Necessity and Progress of Civil Service Reform.pdf/16

 they have learned enough really to earn a salary, they will have to be turned out to make room for others, who are as ignorant and in as great need of instruction as the outgoing set had been before. Evidently this kindergarten theory of the public service is hardly worth discussion. The school of the spoils system, as it has been in operation since 1829, has educated thousands of political loafers, but not one political sage.

That the Government will not work satisfactorily unless all its officers and employees are in political harmony with the ruling party, is also one of those superstitions which some estimable people have not yet been able to shake off. While they sternly resist the argument that there is no Democratic and no Republican way of sorting of letters, or of collecting takes, or of treating Indians, as theoretical moonshine, their belief must, after all, have received a rude shock by the conduct of the last three national Administrations, including the present one.

When in 1885, after twenty-four years of Republican ascendency, the Democrats came into power, President Cleveland determined that, as a general rule, officers holding places covered by the four-years-term law should, if they had conducted themselves irreproachably, be permitted to serve out their four-years terms. How strictly this rule was adhered to I will not now inquire. At any rate it was adhered to in a great many cases. Many Republican officeholders, under that four-years rule, remained in place one, or two, or three years under the Democratic Administration. President Harrison, succeeding Mr. Cleveland, followed a similar rule, although to a less extent. And now President Cleveland again does the same. Not only did we have during his first term the startling spectacle of the great postoffice of New York City remaining in the hands of a postmaster who was not a Democrat, but recently of the Collectorship of the port of New York, once considered the most important political office in the country, being left for a year or more in possession of a Republican.

It is clear, the Presidents who acted thus did not believe