not a party, nor even the people either in a mass or in any of its innumerable divisions, but an essential part of the frame of government; that part which was neither legislature nor judiciary; a part which in the nature of society must of neces sity exist, which in the United States was intentionally and wisely made a system by itself, in order to balance the other portions of the structure. The President might die, but the office could not be vacant. He might be sent back to private life, but his successor took up the instruments which he laid down. He might be incompetent as a British king, but the permanent system of which he represented the power and the wisdom would save him from contempt. He might be unprincipled as a French emperor, but the established courses of administration, more powerful than mere law, would hold his hand. The five early Presidents accepted and maintained this position, to their own advantage and to that of the country. Nor did President Jackson essentially change it. He introduced, it is true, the rule of punishing officials whose only duty was to the government for holding opinions which were hurtful only to himself, if they were hurtful at all; but his very attitude towards the Senate implied a high sense of his official duty, and so long as his strong hand guided the executive system it was maintained in all its power, if not in all its dignity. When he passed away, however, and a succession of weaker men assumed his place, the effects of his example were little by little drawn into service to break down this bulwark of the executive. By an unwritten law of the Constitution, which has seldom been found at fault, the nervous system of the great extra-constitutional party organizations finds its centre in the United States Senate. As the party organizations grew in development and strength, the Senate became more and more the seat of their intrigues; and when the party organizations discovered that their power would be greatly in2 creased by controlling the executive patronage, the Senate lent all its overruling influence to effect this result, and soon became through its individual members the largest dispenser of this patronage.

This was, however, only the first step. Mr. Marcy's celebrated declaration, drawn from the sink of New York politics,

"To the victors belong the spoils," was mischievous, but it was not fatal. The President had always been in the habit of consulting friendly senators and representatives in regard to special appointments, and when he now broke down the permanence and dignity of that administrative system of which he ought to have been the champion, he only admitted individual members of the legislature to a wider influence in executive patronage than they had hitherto enjoyed. But the movement could not stop here. When it was that Congress first began to claim as a right the nominating power which it had until then held as a favor, is a question difficult to answer with exactness, but at all events the concession has been made within the last ten years. It may be safe to say, on the authority of a person well informed as to the history of times in which he has acted a great part, that the assumption by members of Congress of local patronage as a right was first conceded in principle by the first administration of Mr. Lincoln, in 1861. The earlier and notorious instance of Mr. Douglas, in his Illinois campaign, was probably exceptional, and considered as such by the President. By this concession, the executive, the great, permanent constitutional power, which Washington and Jefferson represented, and which the wisdom of our own times aims to suppress, delivered over to the legislature its independence as a co-ordinate branch of the government. Its moral weight, and its individual character as a permanent influence in the government, ruled by administrative principles and guided by conservative maxims drawn from its own history, were rudely shaken by the first blow, but its absolute power was reduced only by the second.

"If the executive power, or any considerable part of it, is left in the hands either of an aristocratical or a democratical assembly, it will corrupt the legislature as necessarily as rust corrupts iron, or as arsenic poisons the human body; and when the legislature is corrupted the people are undone." This principle, laid down by an American writer upon government before the Constitution was framed, received a striking illustration in the result of that revolution which threw the executive patronage into the hands of the legislature. Mr. Lincoln's death was the accidental cause of bringing the - NO. 225.

VOL. CIX.

29

evil to a head, and if any one is curious to follow the exact process by which this poison of executive power works in corrupting a legislature and a people, it is only necessary to watch what has since occurred. Since the foundation of the government there has been no scandal and no corruption which could be compared in its mischievous effects to the disgraceful bargaining for office which took place between President Johnson and the Senate. Even the men who shared in it were ashamed. No one has a word of defence for it. This attempt on the part of the legislature to exercise the executive power, has produced in Congress and in the country an indifference to strict rules of wrong and right, a contempt for personal dignity, a cynical assumption of official dishonesty, and a patient assent to the supposed necessity of corruption, which nothing but a great popular reaction can overcome.

There is no room here for moderate language or for halfway modes of thought. Men must strip from the subject all imaginary distinctions, and confront face to face the bald and disgusting fact that members of Congress cannot be honest with such a power in their hands. Even the best will consult his own interests in distributing patronage, and this means that he will convert a sacred public trust into a private property, an act which by every known code is stigmatized as the highest of crimes. The senator who buys outright with his own money his seat in the national legislature is guilty of an act not more dishonorable to himself and far less hurtful to the public interests than that which he commits in paying for the same dignity out of the nation's means, at the expense of the nation's future good, by an appointment to office. Intrigue and venality are the necessary accompaniments of such an adjustment of powers, and unfortunately, under the American system, political corruption cannot be confined to a class. An aristocracy may indeed be corrupt without infecting the great mass of people beneath it; these may remain sound to the core, and ready to apply the remedy when the evil becomes intolerable. Such has again and again been the case in England when she seemed tottering on the verge of fall. But in America there is no such reserved force. The inevitable effect of opening a permanent and copi

ous source of corruption in the legislature must be that the people are undone.

Thus, when General Grant came into power, the executive which had originally been organized as a permanent system with a permanent and independent existence, and a temporary head, was wholly changed in its nature. While the first five Presidents had in fact formed a continuous government, protected from encroachments by its continuous character, the last five have been the representatives of so many violent revolutions. At first it had been supposed that these revolutions were only the results of party triumphs ("I never said that the victors should plunder their own camp," is the commentary of Mr. Marcy on his own previous declaration). As such, they were excused. But this is no longer pretended. The whole executive system has become the avowed plaything of the legislature. Whatever happens, Congress has established the right to seize and overthrow the whole administration once in every four years forever. It is folly to suppose that the executive can maintain itself while such a right is conceded or even theoretically acknowledged. It is equal folly to imagine that the government itself can endure under a strain which would have broken the Roman Empire into fragments.

General Grant, therefore, whether he knew it or not, was attempting a far more serious reform than any mere improvement of the civil service implies, a reform in comparison with which the proposed saving of $100,000,000 a year to the treasury was but a trifle. The question was not whether he as an individual would make or refuse to make certain appointments, but whether he had the power to wrest the executive authority from the hands of Congress; whether he could obey or understand the meaning of his oath; whether the President was to remain where the Constitution placed him, or whether the Senate was to snatch more and more of the functions of administration, until corruption had taken so deep a root that the people in their disgust would cheer on some modern Gracchus to attempt by sedition a reform which could no longer be accomplished by law. What might have been the result of President Grant's experiment, had he persevered, is a problem

Before a week had

that for the present must remain unsolved. passed it had become clear that the President's perseverance in his attempt would provoke a personal rupture with so many members of the legislature, and secret hostility in so many more, as to endanger the success of the administration.

The President gave way. Then began those cruel scenes which for months reduced the city of Washington to such a condition as is caused by an ordinary pestilence or famine. Private suffering is of small consequence where the nation is the chief sufferer. It matters little how many miserable women and worn-out men, the discarded servants of the Republic, are to be ground to death under the wheels of this slow-moving idol of faction, since their tears or agony are as little likely to save others as they are to help these in their supplications to the inexorable appointment-clerk. Therefore, if it is any consolation to the public to doubt or to hope that the private injustice done and misery caused were exaggerated,- although few persons who had occasion to be near will share their trust, -let them have the benefit of the doubt and rejoice in it. The argument can well afford to spare this poor appeal to human sympathy.

To a certain extent General Grant's administration did only what had been done by its predecessors, and what has long been familiar to the public mind. Although much has been said against the President for his selection of personal friends and relatives for office, so far as this choice had any political meaning it was rather deserving of praise and support, as the last remnant of the President's defeated purpose of rescuing the public service from the taint of political corruption. If a similar process of selection had been carried, with proper care and a wider acquaintance with men, through all the public service, one principal source of corruption, the low intrigues of partisan politicians, would have been greatly checked. In this particular, on the contrary, it was reserved for the administration of President Grant to descend lower than the worst of its predecessors in the scale of self-degradation.

The Grand Army of the Republic was not perhaps organized as a political association. Its nominal object was rather one of charity, and it is believed to have proved useful in lending its