to destroy the freedom of popular choice; they who contrive and execute the election frauds which disgrace some States and cities, repeating and ballot-stuffing, obstruction of the polls, and fraudulent countingsin.… The Civil Service is not in America, and cannot under the system of rotation, become a career. Place-hunting is the career; and an office is not a public trust, but a means of requiting party services, and also, under the method of assessments previously described, a source whence party funds may be raised for election purposes.’45 ‘What characterises’ American politicians,’ as compared with the corresponding class in Europe, is that their whole time is more frequently given to political work; that most of them draw an income from politics, and the rest hope to do so.46
One very natural result is, that while there is no country in the world in which great party contests are fought with more energy and tenacity than in America, there is no country in the world in which the motives that inspire them are more purely or more abjectly sordid. Great unselfish causes are, no doubt, advocated by groups of politicians in America, as elsewhere, but these lie usually within the limits of parties, and are not the true causes of party division. In other countries it is not so. Selfish and corrupt motives no doubt abound; but in the contest between Liberals and Conservatives, Unionists and Radicals, in England; in the great dynastic quarrels, or quarrels between monarchy and republicanism, between clericalism and anti-clericalism, between labour and capital, that divide parties on the Continent, there is always some real principle at issue, some powerful element of unselfish enthusiasm. In America this does not appear to be the case. This is partly, no doubt, due to the absence of great questions in a country which has few serious relations with other nations, which has almost wholly disconnected the interests of Churches and religion from national politics, and in which the Constitution opposes insuperable obstacles to organic change. But it is still more due to the enormous preponderance in politics of selfish interests, and of classes who are animated by such interests. I have quoted on this subject the emphatic language of Mr. Sterne. That of Mr. Bryce is very similar. ‘Politics,’ he says, ‘has now become a gainful profession, like advocacy, stock-broking, the dry-goods trade, or the getting up of companies. People go into it to live by it, primarily for the sake of the salaries attached to the places they count on getting; secondarily, in view of the opportunities it affords of making incidental, and sometimes illegitimate, gains.’ ‘Republicans and Democrats have certain war-cries, organisations, interests enlisted in their support. But those interests are in the main the interests of getting or keeping the patronage of the Government. Tenets and policies, points of political doctrine and points of political practice, have all but vanished. They have not been thrown away, but have been stripped away by time and the progress of events fulfilling some policies, blotting out others. All has been lost except office or the hope of it.’47
There is scarcely any subject on which the best men in America are so fully agreed as upon the absolute necessity of putting an end to this spoils system, if American public life is ever to be purified from corruption. Unfortunately, this system appeals to so many interests and such strong passions, and has been so thoroughly incorporated in the normal working of both of the great parties, that the task of combating it is enormously difficult, and few active politicians have entered into it with real earnestness. There have been frequent efforts in this direction. There was an abortive attempt of Calhoun, in 1839, to prevent a large class of government officers from interfering in elections. There were Acts carried in 1853 and 1855 requiring examinations for some departments of the Civil Service at Washington, and another Act was carried in 1871: but they appear to have been little more than a dead-letter.48 Though the subject was frequently before Congress, no really efficacious step was taken till the Act called the Pendleton Act, which was carried in 1883, and which applied to about 15,000 officials out of about 125,000. It introduced into some departments the system of competitive examinations, gave some real fixity of tenure, and attempted, though apparently with little or no success, to check the system of assessment for political purposes.
The system of competitive examinations has since then been in some degree extended. One of the latest writers on American politics says that about 43,800 servants of the Government, out of nearly 180,000 persons employed in all civil capacities by the United States, are now withdrawn from the spoils system, but he doubts much whether democratic opinion is, on the whole, in favour of an abandonment of the system of rotation and political appointment.49 A considerable movement to abolish it has, however, been set on foot, and the reformers, who are known under the name of Mugwumps, are said to have acquired some real influence. In the opinion of Mr. Gilman, the independent element, which is ‘opposed to any increase of the Civil Service of the State or the nation until a great reform has been accomplished, beyond dispute, in the distribution of the multitude of minor offices,’ is, ‘happily, coming to hold more and more the balance of power.’ ‘There is, he adds,’ a powerful and growing tendency to take out of politics the public charities, the free schools, the public libraries, the public parks, and numerous other features of municipal administration.’ To take an office ‘out of politics,’ Mr. Gilman very characteristically explains, means ‘to take it out of corruption into honesty, and to treat it ‘as a public trust for the benefit of the whole people.’50
The growth of the number of minor officials, which is a natural consequence of the spoils system, and also of the prevailing tendency to extend the functions of government, is exciting serious alarm. A recent Civil Service Commission gives the number of ‘employees’ in the postal service of the United States, in 1891, as 112,800; the number of other ‘employees’ as 70,688. There has been, the commission says, ‘a very startling growth in the number of Government employees, compared with the growth of population.… The growth of a service which can be used for political ends is a rapidly increasing menace to republican government.’ Mr. Gilman quotes the statement of Mr. Curtis, that the first object of every reformer should be ‘to restrict still further the executive power as exercised by party.’ In America, that statesman says, ‘the superstition of Divine right has passed from the king to the party,’ and the belief that it can do no wrong ‘has become the practical faith of great multitudes.’ ‘It makes the whole Civil Service a drilled and disciplined army, whose living depends upon carrying elections at any cost for the party which controls it.’51
On the whole, as far as a stranger can judge, there seem to be in this field real signs of improvement, although they may not be very considerable or decisive. It must be remembered that the period immediately following the War was one peculiarly fitted for the growth of corruption. The sudden and enormous increase of debt, the corresponding multiplication of officials, the paralysis of political life in a great part of the country, and the many elements of social, industrial, and political anarchy that still prevailed, all made the task of professional politicians easy and lucrative. One great improvement which has taken place, and which has spread very swiftly over the United States, has been an alteration in the ballot system. In my own opinion, the ballot, in any country where politics rest on a really sound and independent basis, is essentially an evil. Power in politics should never be dissociated from responsibility, and the object of the ballot is to make the elector absolutely irresponsible. It obscures the moral weight of an election, by making it impossible to estimate the real force of opinion, knowledge, and character that is thrown on either side. It saps the spirit of independence and uprightness, and it gives great facilities for deception and fraud, for the play of mercenary, sordid, and malignant motives, and for the great political evil of sacerdotal influence. But the task of a statesman is, usually, to select the best alternative, and, where intimidation or corruption is very rife, the evils produced by secret voting may be less serious than those which it prevents.
In America, the system of ballot secured no real secrecy, and seemed, and indeed probably was, specially intended to throw all electoral power into the hands of ‘the machine.’ The agents of each organisation were suffered to stand at the poll and furnish the elector with ballot-papers inscribed with the names of their party candidates, and watchful eyes followed him till he placed the paper in the ballot-box. He might, it is true, change the name on the paper, but in the immense majority of cases the votes of the electors were dictated by and known to the party agent.52 A powerful movement, however, grew up, chiefly in 1890 and
