What is known as the spoils system of politics, in a measure common to all times and all forms of government, seems to have reached its highest development in our Republic. This fact justifies the suspicion that something in our form of administration is favorable to such development; and whether we regard the spoils system as praiseworthy or reprehensible, it will be instructive to inquire why it has prevailed in this country as among no other free people. Most persons who deplore the spoils system urge as one of its greatest evils that it substitutes for the discussion of principles a mere scramble for office; that it teaches men to value the material prizes incident to government above political truth. Such reasoners have strangely mistaken cause for effect. The rarity of ideas in our political discussions is not an effect, but the immediate cause of the spoils system; and behind both, as the direct cause of the latter and the remote cause of the former, lies the difficulty of expressing the popular will in legislative enactment. In other words, we have substituted the pursuit of place for the discussion of principles, because the relations of the people to the law-making body are not sufficiently close. No reader of this periodical needs to be reminded that when our present constitution was written the mass of freemen had not, as now, come to believe that a constitutional government should include a legislature promptly obedient to the popular will; a ministry dependent upon the support of a majority in the popular branch of the law-making body; and an executive powerless to interfere in legislation. It was natural, then, that our forefathers, imperfectly acquainted with this modern device of free peoples, should have believed The difficulty of procuring from the people of the United States an unequivocal decision upon any political question, and of expressing that decision in legislative enactment, is familiar to every student of our history. The questions that occupy Congress now are in large part the same that were debated there forty years ago, save that the issue of slavery and the extreme States’ rights theory have disappeared. But even in these cases the exceptions prove the rule; for it is grimly significant of our legislative immobility that the two great questions of a century should finally have been settled by the sword. If the people declared for anything at the general election of 1884, they may be supposed to have declared for a revision of the tariff, since the platform of principles adopted by each great party at its National Convention affirmed the necessity of such revision; yet Congress not only failed to legislate for that object, but actually at one time refused to discuss a measure designed to meet the issue in question, and at another stopped in the midst of such legislation to test the popular will upon the very same matter. Furthermore, while it will be assumed by most persons that whatever the significance Such difficulties have beset us throughout all our history. Let men wince as they would under galling injustice and false economics, they could not work their will upon the body whose duty it is to express in legislation the political desires of the people. A mocking fate seemed to balk the accomplishment of our most earnest purposes, and men whose interests were adverse to the public good constantly took it upon themselves to declare that the people had not spoken upon whatever vital question was uppermost, or that their words had meant something other than they seemed to mean. The result of all this was what we see. A self-governing people must have some sort of political activity, and since it was early discovered that the discussion of principles was little better than a vain occupation, the pursuit of place soon became almost the sole object of political organization. If it was almost impossible to carry a question from the stage of popular discussion to that of legislative enactment, it was a very simple matter to elect presidents and congressmen who should see to a proper distribution of places. Since men could not accomplish the rational object of political endeavor, they strove for what was easily attainable. If they could not make the laws they could at least fill the offices. Then came the easy descent to Avernus. Politics having become a mere struggle for place, public affairs were left more and more in the hands of men who found such work congenial, and the mass of the people, to Having sought thus to trace the steps by which our form of administration has begotten the spoils system, let us endeavor to prove the conclusion by another process of reasoning. Were our government a parliamentary system, such as exists among the free peoples of the Old World, we should have a legislature promptly responsive to movements of the popular will, a ministry sitting in one or the other house of Congress, and dependent for continuance in power upon the support of a majority in the Lower House, and an executive disarmed in whole or in part of the power to negative legislative enactments. The result would be to concentrate interest not as now upon the election of a president whose chief function is to distribute places, and whose part in legislation is almost purely negative, but upon the choice of the legislative body whose majority should determine the political complexion of the president’s advisers and the general policy of the administration. At each general election for members of the Lower House the issue would be some well-defined question then under hot discussion, and in most instances Congress would have been dissolved for the express purpose of taking the sense of the people upon the matter at issue. Public interest in political discussion would return, because great principles, such as have an important bearing upon the lives of all men, would be under debate, and the mass of voters would have such an incentive to activity as the shadowy hope of place could never furnish. The knowledge that the popular will would find prompt expression through the law-making power would render it impossible for the people to be turned from their purpose by the jugglery of place-hunters. With a whole people interested in political discussion no conceivable abuse of patronage could balk them of their will, and the spoils system would disappear because the factitious importance of The attentive reader will have noted that it has been argued, first that the spoils system is the natural and inevitable outcome of the rigidity that seems unseparable from our form of administration; and second, that such a system, in its grossest development, is almost impossible under a parliamentary government. The latter line of argument has been taken less for its own sake than for the purpose of strengthening the conclusions reached by the former; and the writer would not be understood as insisting that to eliminate the spoils system we must adopt exactly such a parliamentary form as now exists among the free peoples of Europe. Any system that should make it easy to ascertain the popular will, and should insure the prompt and certain expression of that will in legislation, would accomplish the object of substituting principles for spoils in our politics. To suggest a plausible plan for grafting upon our system this far more democratic scheme of administration would be a stupendous work, calling for the highest exercise of trained political sagacity; but it is not difficult to indicate some of the things that need not be done. It is not necessary that the president should be reduced to any such mere figure-head as is the monarch in the half-dozen Finally, the consideration presents itself that if the conclusions reached here are correct, those persons who have sought by statutory restriction and appeals to public conscience to abolish the spoils system have not employed the wholesome policy of attacking the evil at its source. They seem to be mowing rather than uprooting the weeds. Doubtless our political garden has been tidied, but the roots of the evil growth and the aptitudes of the soil remain. The reform system, as applied to the great body of minor clerical offices, will probably prevail from now on; but we can scarcely hope that the broad spirit of civil service reform can reign in this land until the people shall have made themselves immediate masters of the legislative power. |