Carl Russell Fish

“ It is a scandal and reproach upon free institutions, and breeds a demoralization dangerous to the perpetuity of republican government. We therefore regard a thorough reform of the civil service as one of the most pressing necessities of the hour; that honesty, capacity, and fidelity constitute the only valid claims to public employment; that the offices of the government cease to be a matter of arbitrary favoritism and patronage and that public station shall become again a post of honor. To this end it is imperatively required that no President shall be a candidate for re-election. ”

“ It is particularly important for Americans to make a distinction between the things which they have always wished to obtain and the methods which they have from time to time used. To build a policy today on the alleged isolation of the American continents would be almost as absurd as to try to build a government on the belief in Divine Right. The American continents are no longer separated from the rest of the world by their national institutions, because the spirit of these institutions has permeated much of Europe, Asia, and even Africa. ”

“ Ninety-nine out of every hundred Whigs thought that the Democrats deserved punishment for the proscription of 1829, and that the most appropriate penalty would be to turn them out of the offices they had usurped. For many years, moreover, the Whigs had been criticising the civil service as corrupt, and naturally their first step in reform was to put new blood into it: similia similibus curantur. When it is remembered, in addition, that the majority of the Whigs were human Americans, who wanted a good office if they could get it, it must be conceded that a proscription was inevitable. ”

“ During the middle of the century, when the American rotated in other professions, it was natural that he should rotate in office, and rotation and the spoils system probably secured, in most parts of the country, a better corps of civil servants than the present system would have done. To-day our general mode of life is more stable, and it is therefore natural that the government service should become more so; the class that is willing to settle down permanently to the prospect of a small but steady income, and a respectable but not distinguished station, is increasing. ”

“ Jefferson, in forwarding Coxe's letter to Madison, said: “This is a sample of the effects we may expect from the late mischievous law vacating every four years nearly all the executive offices of the government. It saps the constitutional and salutary functions of the president, and introduces a principle of intrigue and corruption, which will soon leaven the mass, not only of Senators, but of citizens. It is more baneful than the attempt . . . to make all officers irremovable but with the consent of the Senate” ”

“ We are very prone to disentangle the web of the past, pick out the salient features, and then imagine that they, and they alone, absorbed contemporary attention as well as our own. Thus, when we speak of the Republican victory of 1861 and the inauguration of Lincoln, we think of the on-coming Civil War, and picture the men of that date as occupied wholly with the insoluble problems of slavery. ”

“ All thoughtful men saw that a new era needed a new policy; the wiser, however, were not willing to give up all that they had acquired in the experience of the past. They remembered that the separation of the continents was not proclaimed as an end in itself but as a means of securing American purposes. Those national purposes had been: first, the securing of the right of self-government on the part of the United States; second, the securing of the right of other nations to govern themselves. ”

“ I submit, therefore, to your consideration whether the efficiency of the government would not be promoted, and official industry and integrity better secured, by a general extension of the law which limits appointments to four years.
“In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another. Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense. No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is matter of right. ”

“ Many members chosen in New York and Pennsylvania owed their election to a skilful abuse of the patronage at home, and few abandoned their arts at the threshold of the capital. Thus it happened that, while the main fountain remained fairly pure, the stream of the patronage was mudded by the soil through which it flowed. It is to the states, too, that we must look for prophecies of the future; for nearly all our great national political movements have grown slowly and unevenly, appearing first in one state, then in another, and remaining for many years local in their manifestation. ”

“ But, before Camara was called home, the public were watching his advance against the little American fleet at Manila, with an anxiety perhaps greater than Dewey's own. Nothing in modern war equals in dramatic tension the deadly, slow, inevitable approach of a fleet from one side of the world against its enemy on the other. Both beyond the reach of friendly help, each all powerful until it meets its foe, their home countries have to watch the seemingly never coming, but nevertheless certain, clash, which under modern conditions means victory or destruction. ”

“ It is probably true, moreover, that in the long run a civil service pension system properly related to salaries would not cost the government one cent; for, when pensions are not given, pay must be high enough to allow of individual saving. Still, it cannot be denied that such a provision would be unpopular, and would indeed denote a change in the spirit of American institutions, which have been so strongly individualistic and so insistent that each man should take care of himself. ”

“ Now, some men labor for love and some for glory; but glory comes only to the leaders of ten thousands, to the very few — it cannot serve as a general inducement, and even those who love must live. It is an essential idea of democracy that these leaders shall be of the people; they must not be gentlemen of wealth and leisure, but they must — the mass of them at any rate — belong to the class that makes its own living. If, then, they are to devote their time to politics, politics must be made to pay. It is here that the function of the spoils system becomes evident ”

“ One class of appointments has brought to Jackson, as to other presidents, perhaps undeserved credit, — that of literary men to diplomatic posts. Such appointments are generally non-political and are therefore lauded; but poets and novelists are seldom better diplomats than are politicians, and it is almost as mischievous to use the civil service as a pension fund for literary celebrities as for disabled soldiers or defeated congressmen. The few appointments of this character made by Jackson brought in a flood of applications from budding geniuses all over the country. ”

“ Perhaps no American document relating to diplomacy ever before made so great a stir in the world. Its unexpectedness enhanced its effect, even in the United States, for the public had not been sufficiently aware of the shaping of this international episode to be psychologically prepared for the imminence of war. Unlike most Anglo-American diplomacy, this had been a long-range negotiation, with notes exchanged between the home offices instead of personal conferences. People blenched at the thought of war; stocks fell; the attention of the whole world was arrested. ”

“ At bottom, the present attack on the merit system is, in large part, a reappearance of the old jealousy of the executive so many times illustrated in the history of the patronage. [26]
What has enabled civil service reform to progress, unpopular as it has been because of its foreign origin, and interfering, as it has done, with our established political institutions? Why have not the congressmen, who have been deprived of the means of sustaining their political machines, and more than half of whom are probably hostile to the system, risen in successful revolt? ”