Spoils system

“ The infernal spoils system in the South, if not checkmated, will destroy the country. This same spoils principle has been the cause of more wretchedness and guilt, individual and national, than any other in the history of human suffering. It is the incentive alike to the burglar who breaks and enters your house at night and the highwayman who waylays your path and takes your life; that, rising from individuals to multitudes, it is the impelling motive to all the plunderings and desolations of military conquests ”

“ Such men, however, while resisting its temptations and debasing influences, have by no means been exempt from the harassing and distracting effects of the spoils system, and, I am sure they are among the foremost to condemn it and to favor its abolition. ”

“ But every attentive observer knows that the spoils system has been the principal and most effective agency in furnishing that evil tendency with an organized and well-drilled force of spoils politicians, or mercenaries—a force always standing ready for action in season and out of season, with untiring energy and sleepless perseverance, whenever anything is to be done to keep our political life down to the level of a scramble for the loaves and fishes and to protect it against the invasion of the higher aspirations of a truly patriotic citizenship. ”

“ A spoils system does not drive ability from the civil service; it rather attracts many brilliant men who think they can sail best in troubled waters; it appeals to the gambler's instinct. Such men have characteristics different from those of the seekers after the safe monotony of a life position, but their capacities are fully as great. The really deleterious change that the spoils system does make is to throw open the doors of office to a very inferior class of men, and to lower the minimum of capacity required. ”

“ Thus Civil Service Reform has no longer to struggle for its right of existence. So much is triumphantly established. The problem remains how to secure, by further conquest, what we have won; for the results the Reform movement has achieved will not be entirely safe until its success is complete—until the spoils system is totally abolished, and the new order of things has supplanted it in the ordinary ways of thinking and the political habits of the people. ”

“ On the other hand, the spoils system breeds a class of men whose financial interest it is to take this necessary time and trouble. They are paid for so doing, and they are paid out of the public chest. Under the spoils system a man is appointed to an ordinary clerical or ministerial position in the municipal, Federal, or State government, not primarily because he is expected to be a good servant, but because he has rendered help to some big boss or to the henchman of some big boss. ”

“ Mainly because the spoils system attracts to them, and makes prominent and important in them, impure elements. On the other hand, men of a higher tone, disgusted with this spectacle, will sometimes fall to the rear; and thus we deplore the loss of some of the most valuable elements of the population from active political life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The spoils system is therefore not only not a stimulus of true public spirit, but in spreading the mercenary tendency among the people it has served to baffle and discourage true public spirit by the offensive infusion in political life of the mercenary element. ”

“ The "spoils system" has helped to sustain all manner of abominations, from grasping monopolies and civic jobbery down to political rum-shops. The virus runs through everything, and the natural tendency of the evil is to grow with the growth of the country. ”

“ During the forty years I have been more or less actively connected with public life, I have witnessed and taken part in a great many things. I have served my apprenticeship as a practical politician. I started under what is currently called the spoils system, when the distribution of offices as rewards for political or personal service was the recognized rule, and the present civil service reform was not yet thought of. ”

“ At first this lot system seemed very foolish to me indeed, bordering upon absurdity, but the more I studied its simplicity and observed its results, the more I became impressed with its good sense and efficiency. There are no political parties fomenting discord in a country under a spoils system ”

“ At the time of the first issue of Poole's Index the civil service was prominently before the public, and consequently all articles in the periodicals which the index includes have been made so easily accessible that it is unnecessary to recapitulate them here. The two most useful periodical publications are Niles's Register, which furnishes contemporary comment and episode throughout the period of the establishment of the spoils system, and the Nation, the date of whose foundation (1865) coincides with the beginning of the effective reform movement. ”

“ Well, are we wrong in reproaching economists with being dry and cold? What a picture of human nature! What! Is spoliation, then, to be regarded as an inevitable, almost normal, force, assuming all forms, at work under all pretexts, by law and without law, jobbing and abusing things the most sacred, working on feebleness and credulity by turns, and making progress just in proportion as these are prevalent! ”

“ And while the developed sustaining system, which gives to a social organism the industrial type, acquires for itself, like the developed sustaining system of an animal, a regulating apparatus of a diffused or uncentralized kind, it tends also to decentralize the primary regulating apparatus, by making it derive from more numerous classes its deputed powers. ”

“ When Spoliation has once become the recognised means of existence of a body of men united and held together by social ties, they soon proceed to frame a law which sanctions it, and to adopt a system of morals which sanctifies it. ”

“ They may even imagine that they owe all to spoliation—not only what is left to them, but what is taken from them, and what is lost in the process. Nay more, I affirm that, in course of time, and owing to the ingenious mechanism to which they become accustomed, many men become spoliators without knowing that they are so, or desiring to be so. Monopolies of this kind are engendered by artifice and nourished by error. They disappear only with advancing enlightenment.
I have said enough to show that political economy has an evident practical utility. ”

“ As the essential conditions of the series of events, as the machinery by which everything is brought about, these defects are of the utmost importance to the story. It is the accused system that awards to Tyrrel and Falkland their immense preponderance in society, and enables them to use the power of the law for the most nefarious ends. ”

“ If men like Koch and Pasteur had only had such a system, how much more scope their work might have had! Efficient universal coöperation—that’s the thing in science to-day—the time of this silly, jealous, fumbling individual research has gone by. ”

“ I speak to those who hold wealth in esteem—and understand by this word, not the opulence of the few, but the comfort, the well-being, the security, the independence, the instruction, the dignity of all.
There are only two ways by which the means essential to the preservation, the adornment and the perfection of life may be obtained—production and spoliation. Some persons may say: "Spoliation is an accident, a local and transient abuse, denounced by morality, punished by the law, and unworthy the attention of political economy." ”

“ Three-quarters of it is wasted by giving it to hangers-on."
"Public men should be unhampered by demands for spoils."
"They invite the demands, Phil," replied the doctor, dryly. "If it were not openly known that a man could get a position as a corporation lawyer, or timekeeper in a big mine, or some other inducement, do you think any would-be senator, for instance, would be troubled by distributing 'spoils of office'?" ”

“ It is the torch which, unveiling deceit and dissipating error, destroys that social disorder called spoliation. Some one, a woman I believe, has correctly defined it as "the safety-lock upon the property of the people." ”

“ But if, on the other hand, diverse and dissimilar fishes can be referred as a whole to identical functions of very different co-ordinate systems, this fact will of itself constitute a proof that variation has proceeded on definite and orderly lines, that a comprehensive “law of growth” has pervaded the whole structure in its integrity, and that some more or less simple and recognisable system of forces has been at work. ”

“ Now, when this couple die, each one of their children receives its share, not of the whole, but of each field owned by the parents. Suppose this process to go on for a century, and it will be readily understood that a peasant may own thirty or forty fields, each containing but a small fraction of an acre, and no two of which lie together. To remedy the evils of this system, Verkoppelung commissions were created for each province by the state, which also undertook the draining, irrigation, and laying out of roads through the land on which they worked. ”

“ The principle of modern defences, therefore, is necessarily no longer a complete enceinte, as in old days, by which the place to be protected was surrounded by a cunningly devised system of ramparts and ditches, so arranged as that the various parts mutually supported each other ”

“ At the works of the Bethlehem Steel Company, for example, as a result of this law, instead of allowing each shoveler to select and own his own shovel, it became necessary to provide some 8 to 10 different kinds of shovels, etc., each one appropriate to handling a given type of material not only so as to enable the men to handle an average load of 21 pounds, but also to adapt the shovel to several other requirements which become perfectly evident when this work is studied as a science. ”

“ Let us try, then, to describe the beneficent force which tends gradually to surmount the mischievous and injurious force to which we have given the name of spoliation, and the presence of which is only too well explained by reasoning, and established by experience. ”

“ Bodies of men were collected and arrayed by signals, evidently directed by a system of organization in which many were combined, and such system was conducted in a manner which had hitherto set at defiance all the exertions of law and order. ”

“ Each town has its own methods, good and bad, and the result is a heterogeneous mixture. Often there are two or three laws where one would definitely serve. To do absolute justice there should be a definite system, with laws elastic enough to satisfy the needs of all. ”

“ Wherever in agriculture the ancient system of triennial rotation (Dreifelder-system = three-field system) has been exchanged for the so-called English system, not only is a greater number of men supported, but, as a rule, each is more abundantly provided for. ”

“ Again, in the unmodified ectoderm, as we see it in the Hydra, the units are all endowed both with impressibility and contractility; but as we ascend to higher types of organization, the ectoderm differentiates into classes of units which divide those two functions between them: some, becoming exclusively impressible, cease to be contractile; while some, becoming exclusively contractile, cease to be impressible. Similarly with societies. In an aboriginal tribe, the directive and executive functions are diffused in a mingled form throughout the whole governing class. ”

“ Rather the new system has emerged from the old by a procession of unconsidered changes, at different times, of varying importance, the results of which have come to be so universally known and approved, that to the backward glance they seem to be not the outcome of long experience, but inextricable parts of a system which has existed from all time. ”

“ For, if the pole system is a nuisance, and the underground way is not; or, if the former permanently obstructs the streets, and the latter does not; or, if the pole system is dangerous to life, limb, and property, and the underground plan is not, or is less so—then, so long as the poles are left standing, and the wires strung, the franchise is not exercised in such manner as to reduce the nuisance to a minimum, and to inflict the least injury upon others, and the corporate acts are unprotected by law. ”

“ In an exchange between two services, one of them may be of bad quality; but here, the services received being stipulated for beforehand, spoliation must evidently recede before the advance of public enlightenment.
Next in order come abuses of public services—a vast field of spoliation, so vast that we can only glance at it.
Had man been created a solitary animal, each man would work for himself. Individual wealth would, in that case, be in proportion to the services rendered by each man to himself.
But, man being a sociable animal, services are exchanged for other services ”

“ And, in the absence of a nervous system, the arrangement must necessarily be such that these different units, and different groups of units, severally pursuing their individual lives without positive direction from the rest, nevertheless do, by virtue of their constitutions, and the relative positions into which they have grown, coöperate for the maintenance of one another and the entire aggregate. ”