session, nor to seek any further explanation for the Senate's action on appointments than such as the long story just told may be thought to indicate. In the language of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, the legislative department has learned to exercise executive powers, and the government is one of men and not of laws. No senator would protect the consular clerk, and the Senate rejected the nomination. Whatever may have been the immediate cause of this rejection, it was not such as to discourage the department. Within a short time another consular clerk was nominated to a vacant consulate, and to him the Senate appears to have offered no opposition. He was confirmed, and the department was so well pleased with its success that it quickly sent in a third and a fourth nomination of the same nature, both of which were duly confirmed by the Senate. Thus, at the close of the last administration, the department had actually made a considerable advance towards its darling object, the improvement of the service. Eleven permanent consular clerks were distributed over the world, and three more had already been promoted to consulates. The experiment had fully answered every expectation, and the system was at last firmly established. Nevertheless, the department was not yet destined to pass beyond the range of disappointments. Another trial of its patience and endurance was now at hand, -a contingency foreseen by Mr. Fessenden, and strangely pressed by many persons as a ground for discouraging any attempt at reform. A new administration came into power, welcomed by the public as a vindictive enemy of all political jobbery and corruption. The story of this disastrous time has already been told. Few disinterested spectators of the outrages then committed under cover of blind power are ever likely to look back upon that experience without a certain warmth of indignation and contempt which seems to require some personal object to vent itself upon; but in this instance there seems to be no reason for accusing any individual of intentional wrong-doing; or if any one was to blame the secret is hid in official places, where it cannot be reached. All that the Register shows is that the department succeeded in protecting only one of its promoted pupils; the other two, although no complaint appears to have been made either against their efficiency or their loyalty, were removed, and their places filled in the old manner. If these were not corrupt political jobs, the department may consider itself as more than usually fortunate. After more than fifteen years of perseverance, however, which has hitherto proved successful, it is unlikely that the department will be discouraged by any ordinary chance. Unless it is crushed outright by the legislature, it will still do its best to serve the public honestly and efficiently, and in this attempt it will receive the support of the best senators. Nor is this statement true of only one department. The story of these consular pupils has been told to show that the executive as a governing influence must and does feel the burden of its responsibility, and that no President, even though he is selected by politicians to act as their tool, can ever entirely forget or betray the trust which a power far beyond the politicians has placed in his hands. If the President is weak, it is merely because public opinion is silent and support is not to be found. Arouse this, and there will then be no danger that the President will prove indifferent to the duty of protecting the purity of his administration, or that politicians within Congress or elsewhere will assume an authority which belongs not to a man nor to any body of men, but to the laws alone. The final propositions which must stand as the basis of any permanent reform may now be gathered together, and summed up in a single sentence: The system of government in the United States has suffered a radical change; the executive, held by weak hands, has thrown away first its shield and then its sword, first its permanence and then its power, until it has been reduced so low that even General Grant, the most resolute and the most popular of Presidents, has recoiled from the task of raising it. As a necessary consequence of a weakened executive, Congress has seized and now claims as its right the most important executive powers. In exercising these powers, the legislature has, in obedience to a principle well understood by students of the science of government, converted a high public trust into an instrument of private gain, a crime which, in morals if not in law, deserves the punish -- ment attached to a felony, and justly causes, and has already brought about, a forfeiture of public confidence. As a necessary result of a weakened executive and a corrupted legislature, party organizations have become the tools of personal intrigue; public offices serving as the bribes by which a few men purchase personal support at the nation's expense. Even the remotest local politics have been perverted by this curse, and beyond the limit of political activity the evil extends ultimately to the relations of man to man, degrading and corrupting society itself. If the conclusions insisted on in these pages are in any way correct, the whole subject of civil-service reform is reduced to a single principle, the same which is asserted in the thirtieth article of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights. Tested by this touchstone, all mere experiment, all novel legislation like that suggested by Mr. Jenckes, however excellent in purpose, must be held wrong both in principle and in detail, calculated to aggravate rather than to check the evil. So far as the legislature is concerned, there is but one rule to follow. Let Congress keep its hands off executive powers. Let it not undertake to interfere by any mandatory legislation in matters which are beyond its sphere, unless indeed it is disposed to make solicitation for office, either directly or indirectly, a penal offence. Let it imitate the example of the British Parliament, which, omnipotent as it is, respects the principles of government so far that it wisely contents itself with advising or approving competition in the civil service, but has never ventured to legislate upon it. The President already possesses all the law he needs, all the law which Jefferson or Madison required. The executive system should not depend on the legislature for the character of its service. Two separate powers should not be blindly confused. If Congress can give, Congress can take away, and as a necessary result an act of Congress may forbid the President to exercise powers which are essential to the executive office, and confer them upon a creature of the legis lature. The executive cannot with safety lean on this treacherous staff of legislative enactments. No doubt a great burden of responsibility is thus thrown upon the President; and if Presidents betray the trust which the people repose in them, and, knowing what should be done, refuse to do it; if they consider their great office as merely that of a servant to the legislature, and not that of a guardian to the public interests; if they find their arms too weak to hold up the authority they have sworn to maintain, or if they decide to place their own ease before their official duty,― reform will indeed become more difficult, although still not desperate. With a President equal to his post, who understood and accepted his responsibilities and trusted to the deep public sympathy which seldom fails a bold and honest leader, the struggle would be comparatively short. Such a President might restore the executive to its early dignity, might elevate the tone and morals of the legislature, might redeem the character of party organizations, might purify even local politics; he might, if competitive examinations are the panacea for every evil, extend a network of them over every office, down to the Treasury porters, and establish his reforms so firmly in the minds of the people that the Republic would never again be in danger on this score; finally, he might revive the fainting hopes of honest men, giving to the government many years of renewed life, and, what is better still, a few years of high example: but such a President is to be prayed for rather than expected. Be this as it may, the true policy of reformers is to trust neither to Presidents nor to senators, but appeal directly to the people. Whatever troubles distract the state, public opinion is first responsible either for creating or tolerating them. Whenever public opinion has once declared itself in favor of civil-service reform, and against the corrupt use of patronage by politicians, the evil will cease; nor need any anxiety be thrown away in regard to resistance by the Senate, since such factious opposition would only give to the people the opportunity of striking at the agents of corruption, an opportunity which may one day be used with effect so soon as old political issues can be finally disposed of. But before this time arrives, the public must be convinced that reform is a vital question, that the evils and dangers are real, and not mere inventions of a lively fancy. To effect this there is no way but to attack corruption in all its holes, to drag it before the public eye, to dissect it and hold the diseased members up to popular disgust, to give the nation's conscience no rest nor peace until mere vehemence of passion overcomes the sluggish self-complacency of the public mind. To build by slow degrees this deep foundation of moral conviction, to erect upon it a comprehensive and solid structure of reform, and to bequeath the result to posterity as a work not inferior in quality to that of the Republic's founders, is an aim high enough to satisfy the ambition of one generation. Such a movement must necessarily be slow. It is scarcely worth while even to pretend a hope that anything can be at once accomplished, least of all in Congress. The few members of the legislature who are conscious of their own shortcomings, and the still smaller number who would honestly aid in restoring a better tone to the government and to politics, are united by no common bond of sympathy, and have neither a name nor even a power of combination. Time alone, and the steady increase of corruption, can bring them so close together as to act with any purpose or vigor. Yet if there is one of them who feels in earnest the evils for which many are ready enough to profess a theoretical antipathy, he may by a comparatively simple expedient effect everything that can or need be effected by legislative action. Without in any way interfering with Mr. Jenckes's bill,- a measure too cumbrous for the weak reforming influence in Congress to put in motion, - let him move, and press to a debate and a vote, two concise resolutions: one, recommending the President to extend the principle of competitive examinations to all branches of the service in which it might in his opinion be usefully applied; the other, declaring the opinion of Congress that, in respect to removals from office, the executive should return to the early practice of the government. Whenever Congress can be brought to assert these two principles, it will be time enough for the public to discuss the details of reform. HENRY BROOKS ADAMS. |