THERE are many weighty problems before the country in connection with the reconstruction and the regeneration of the Southern States, and with financial and fiscal affairs; but these, and other questions, are all subordinate in importance to that relating to the organization of the civil service of the United States.

At present there is no organization save that of corruption; no system save that of chaos; no test of integrity save that of partisanship; no test of qualification save that of intrigue.

The consequence is, that the revenue laws are not executed, for the want of faithful officers; and these and other laws are imperfectly applied, for the want of competent functionaries.

In local, general, and Presidential elections, the whole country is thrown into convulsions; and who would imagine that these demonstrations of public liberty are converted into engines of public demoralization? But in the present chaos of the civil service it is so. Every man elected to State or national, executive or legislative positions, promises offices to a number of citizens who vote for him, and the great majority of the hundreds of thousands of officeholders of the United States are virtually nothing else than political mercenaries, who are paid by the state, instead of being paid by the individual whom their votes lift into

power.

If one hundred thousand mercenaries were actually paid in cash by the state at the average rate of two thousand dollars, the country would know that it is bled annually to the extent of two hundred million dollars; and resign itself by adding this amount to the general cost of representative government; and Congressmen and Customhouse Directors, and members of the

Cabinet, and other legislative and executive authorities might rise at least in public estimation in proportion to the additional prize-money exacted from the country for their retainers.

But these satellites of the executive and legislative planets are not only paid by the state, instead of being paid by the luminaries around whom they revolve, but they rob the state; they mismanage public business, and bring free institutions into disrepute by proclaiming to the world that representative government can only be maintained by subsidizing organized bands of mercenary office-holders, and by securing the boon of political liberty at the cost of morality and of the culture and attainments requisite for the public service.

If republican institutions cannot be maintained except by holding out bribes to voters, it would at all events be more economical and respectable for the United States Government to make a bargain with each person elected to legislative and executive offices, paying him a certain amount for his expenses at the poll or in the State legislatures, and reserving to itself the power of appointing public officers who have undergone examinations and passed the tests prescribed by Mr. Jenckes's Civil Service bill. But to pay the gentlemen who help the honorable Representatives from the different States to their respective seats, or eminent politicians to secretaryships, collectorships, and foreign missions, by conferring upon them public offices, allotted geographically or indiscriminately, and then to incur the risk of their robberies, blunders, and mismanagements of every kind, is not only intolerable upon the score of total depravity, but also upon that of total stupidity, and one of two things is sure

to happen either the Republic must break up this systematized demoralization, or it will break up the Republic.

As long as this demoralization lasts, the Republic will be so only in name. In fact, it will be a species of crapulous, democratic imperialism, which ransacks the gutters of the land for the purpose of enlisting mercenaries, who, in reward for their services, prop up the Presidential throne and the legislative pillars, and then, with the true instinct of freebooters recruited under the piratical banner that to the "victors belong the spoils," rob and disgrace a nation which is foolish enough to believe that liberty can thrive when its standard-bearers are reeking with ignorance and venality.

Foreign nations need not be startled by this frank statement of ugly facts. If they had not introduced African slavery into the North American continent, and if they had not fastened upon this country the noble but irksome task of educating into manhood and freedom European paupers and the children of these paupers, the American people might have found leisure and opportunity to devise measures for purging their public service from ignorance and corruption, and for making the tests of moral and mental qualification more stringent in proportion to the increase of population and territory, and the corresponding increase of public offi

cers.

But as it was, we had no breathingtime. Slavery stared us in the face at the very dawn of our national existence. The slavery question so distracted the country, that even those who were appalled by the growing demoralization of the public service shrank from laying hands upon the monster, because it was overshadowed by the still greater monster, slavery.

It may be asserted that, during the war of independence, the curses against slavery were hushed by the necessity of unanimity in throwing off the British yoke, and that, since the achievement of our independence, the painful feeling

inspired by the traffic in public offices was quelled by the greater indignation aroused by the supremacy of the slave oligarchy.

That the traffic in public offices became the most formidable auxiliary of this supremacy, and that the most unenlightened elements of the European importations of population were controlled by it, almost despotically, require no demonstration at our hands. The facts are matter of history. The politicians of the Tory and slavery school would never have had such a long lease of power, if they had not been able to hold out the bait of office to their most unscrupulous camp-followers. To talk to them of a reform in the civil service, would have been regarded as stark insanity: they would have scouted the idea of dispelling a chaos that fostered their designs, and of introducing a system of culture and integrity which would have blasted their hopes.

Conscious as every thoughtful citizen was of the abuses of political life, he was equally conscious of the futility of attempting to reform any of its branches as long as the fountain head of political liberty and morals was poisoned by the abettors of the slavery power.

While the country was struggling against the progress of slavery, it was at the same time engaged in the civilization of its new territories, and in the education of its new European streams of population. To have converted the American wildernesses into prosperous cities, and marshalled gigantic armies for the overthrow of the old Tory and slave power, and at the same time kept our civil service and political machinery free from those abuses, which had such an immense scope, we would have been superhuman.

We have been only human and could not carry out a series of vast transformations and reforms at one and the same time.

It is because we have accomplished such great deeds within a few generations, that we can afford to lay bare the

evils which still gnaw the heart-life of the Republic. Weak nations may feel constrained to gloss over the defects of their systems of administration, but strong nations need not stoop to concealment of national blemishes. In our case, frankness is a token of power. It is, moreover, a great relief to follow the practice of the English race, in calling things by their names, and in taking the bull by the horn. We have, therefore, not scrupled to present the darkest aspect of our political spoiltraffic theories. But having said thus much, we have to put in what French lawyers would call pleas of extenuation. They consist in this: that in our country but few, if any, persons can afford or are inclined to work for nothing. Hence, if Jones works for the election of Brown, Jones expects to be compensated in some way or other. Not only that Jones must live, and that Mrs. and the Misses Jones must be able to make a decent figure in society, but Jones is also imbued with a certain rough sense of dignity. Self-sacrifice being superseded, in the current of modern ethics, by self-elevation, Jones claims his reward not only as due to Jones in the concrete, but also to Jones in the abstract; to the man as well as to the citizen; to his individual wants as well as to his civic claims. In mediæval times Jones would have got his pay, and there would have been an end of Jones. But at the present day Jones claims that his emotions as well as his pockets are involved in the transaction. He sympathizes with the political church of Brown, and, long after having received his compensation in the shape of a postmastership, or a clerkship in the Treasury or the Customhouse, or an assessorship, he uses his influence, whatever that may be, in the interest of the common political church. Brown has to sustain him accor ingly, and to vote for an increase of his salary, and even to oppose the reform in the office in which Jones is employed, in the event of such reform threatening to submerge Jones. Jones may steal; he may blunder; when appointed to a

postmastership, he may desert his post and saddle upon the country the additional expense of sustaining Jones's shadow or deputy; when in the Treasury, he may connect himself with rings, and betray the secrets of his office; he may commit all sort and manner of irregularities and delinquencies, but as long as he clings to the political church, there is a chance at least of political salvation, and in most cases also of escape from justice, and of shelter against exposure and removal. Or, without being positively criminal and unfaithful, he may be altogether incompetent for the discharge of his duties, or revel in sinecures, as thousands of Joneses do all over the country, and in foreign offices; but he adheres to the tenets of the political church, and Brown, his high priest, bestows upon him absolution for all his sins.

Now, what the Browns fear in voting for the adoption of the Jenckes Civil Service Bill, which provides for tests of examination and qualification, so as to purge the service from all incompetent and dishonest persons, is that they will be lost by losing the support of the Joneses.

And here we are at issue with the Browns. We contend that there are all kind and manner of Joneses. There are incompetent, dishonest Joneses, and there are well-qualified and perfectly honest Joneses. All Brown has to do, is to shift his base. He must turn his back upon rascals and loafers and ignoramuses, or resign himself to private life, if he cannot select his sponsors for his public life from the honorable and able members of the community in the midst of which he lives. Brown may promise to give to Jones the benefit of his patronage, provided that Jones possesses the requisite moral and intellectual qualifications for the office to which he aspires. The Jenckes bill does not do away with political patronage. It only makes it subject to certain conditions of fitness, which are of greater importance to the state than the rise of Brown or the fall of Jones, and

which moreover relieve Brown from the fearful responsibility of fastening upon the public service a worthless person, and Jones from temptations to which he may not be subjected in remaining a loafer and good-for-nothing in private life. If the Jenckes bill fails to pass, how is the state to be protected? Is Brown to be held responsible for the delinquencies of his protégé, and for the money which Jones draws from the people, without giving in return for it adequate, efficient, faithful work?

Surely somebody ought to be held responsible. In the present chaos and demoralization nobody is responsible; nay, Jones pleads that he has to feather his nest, because he may be turned out when Black turns out Brown; and thus the hard-working people are the only sufferers in this palladium of Liberty, as they are in the strongholds of despotism.

The statistics of all these cases are selfevident. In an isolated evil, the public might withhold their verdict until the facts are proven and authenticated. But here we have to deal with a wide-spread evil, which defrauds the country in the collection of taxes on a scale so gigantic that the commissioners of revenue, collectors, assessors, and Treasury officers -at least those of them who are honest -bow their heads in shame and despair. We have to deal with an evil that is manifest here and there and everywhere. To present particular instances of it, would be to claim the space of several annual volumes of this magazine, without exhausting the documentary evidence. All that can be attempted by the publicist on the first wrestling with this myriad-armed evil, is to reveal not only the fact of its existence, which every American knows, but-and what is more painful-to disclose, also, the fact that no remedy has been so far proposed for its diminution, if not eradication, excepting that contained in the Jenckes Civil Service bill.

It will be seen at a glance that the bill does not go far enough. The Constitution vesting in the President the

appointing power, by and with the consent of the Senate, the bill could only primarily deal with those subordinate officers who are appointed by the heads of departments. But it contains a provision which enables the Senate to be guided in its confirmation or rejection of persons nominated to that body by the Executive by an examination test to which these persons may, in the judgment of the Senate, be subjected, together with the candidates for subordinate offices.

The bill goes probably as far as it can go under the present Constitutional limitations, and as a first instalment of reformatory measures. Mr. Senator Patterson, of New Hampshire, is to introduce a similar bill for the reform of the foreign service.

The adoption of these two bills would effect, however, only a partial reform.

To consolidate it, a reorganization of some of the public departments is indispensable. The Treasury Department, for instance, controls the customs, the revenue offices, the statistical bureau, apart from the multitudinous branches of the Treasury proper, including the currency and printing bureau. In giving to one man the control of such an immense caravansary of offices, and of the corresponding patronage, a bureaucratic despotism is built up in the midst of free institutions, which, whenever a President is hostile to the popular will, may easily be used as a formidable weapon against the People. It must be borne in mind that, when the Treasury Department was established, it could not have been anticipated that, after a few generations, the population would increase from a few millions to forty millions, and that the dominion of the Republic would spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The men appointed as secretaries of the Treasury are select ed by the President, to be sure, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate; but while their politics are well known and primarily determine their selection, they are generally taken