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the number of office-holders in the United States quadrupled in the period from 1860 to 1870, and that these appointments are systematically made through mere party motives, and irrespective of the capacity of the claimant. ‘This system,’ he continues,’ not only fills the public offices of the United States with inefficient and corrupt officials in high station, and keeps out of political life the capable men who are disinclined to perform party work as a condition precedent to accession to office, but it also created the same system under those officials as to all their subordinates.… They were to a very large degree, and still are, regularly assessed to pay the political expenses of the campaign. Millions of dollars are thus raised from office-holders in the United States at every recurring Presidential election, or even local election.… Such assessments were paid because they knew that their official existence would be terminated in the event of a change of Administration, under the domination of an adverse party.… The evil of the abominable “spoils” system in the United States is not so much the incompetency of the officers—an American's adaptiveness enables him quickly to learn the routine duties of an office—nor in the waste of public money (because in a community so rich in productive power as that of the United States the amount which peculation can take from it is a burden easy to be borne)—but the main evil is that the spoils system demoralises both parties, and makes contests which should be for principle mainly for plunder.’ Under its influence, this writer adds, the quadrennial presidential elections have become ‘mere scrambles for office.’43

      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

      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

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