This was not the end. The dismissed secretary wished to have it appear that he had not been dismissed at all, that he had voluntarily resigned his office, that his resignation had been regretfully accepted, and that he had been honorably appointed to another position where he, as a man of high personal worth, was fitly to represent a great nation at an imperial court. To make it appear so, it was necessary that the public records should be falsified, and that the President of the United States should be a party to this falsification. Colonel McClure says: "In my presence the proposition was made and determined upon to ask Lincoln to allow a letter of resignation to be ante-dated, and to write a kind acceptance of the same in reply. * The record shows that Mr. Cameron voluntarily resigned, while, in point of fact, he was summarily removed without notice."

It may be said that a strong-minded President can resist the wrong influence of his party. Well, General Grant, was such a man; yet he did not. We all know, without stating them, the harsh charges that were made from time to time, with more or less justice, respecting the evil influence of the party managers over him; and his most ardent admirer cannot deny that some, at least, of those charges were probably well founded. The least grave of them was sufficient to cast a deeply to be regretted stain on the political, nay, personal, character of a chief magistrate. President Hayes unqualifiedly expressed his intention to carry out some measure of civil service reform, and, undoubtedly, honestly made his best effort to do so; but how lamentably he has failed. Mr. Garfield was nominated at the last Republican Convention for the Presidency. He is, beyond question, a man of high integrity and ability. Two men were proposed in the convention for nomination for the Vice Presidency, Mr. Washburne and Mr. Arthur. It cannot be denied that Mr. Arthur's career in office, so far as could be seen, has been that of a "machine" politician. A delegate arose in the convention and made an earnest appeal against his nomination, and in favor of Mr. Washburne's. He said, in substance: "The Republican party is pledged by its platform to civil service reform. Do not stultify yourselves. The people will think over your action quietly at their firesides." But to no use. Mr. Arthur was nominated, and Mr. Garfield's hands are tied. For Mr. Arthur represents the "machine," and Mr. Garfield cannot be elected without the aid of the "machine" -at least, the "machine" makes it appear he cannot be. He must bow to it if he shall be elected. And the Republican people who want civil service reform may think at their firesides

VOL. II.-10.

ad libitum, but they can find no way of acting adversely to Mr. Arthur, so far as he represents the opposition to civil service reform, except by voting against Mr. Garfield. They must, consequently, vote with the "machine."

No one loves the "machine," or sees anything to admire in it, except those who live, or hope to live, by it. Yet our country is growing so large, and there are so many "offices to go around," that by one device or another the "machine" is always triumphant. From the highest federal office to the lowest State office political preferment is obtained, not by the display of marked or suitable qualities for doing the work of office as it should be done, but only by capacity for managing primaries and conventions according to the modes of the "machine." This is the ability which most certainly makes a successful politician in free America to-day. Straightforward, honest directness of purpose, with which the dreamers fondly characterize the ideal republican politician of an Anglo-Saxon republic, has given place, with us, to an Asiatic suppleness and skill in intrigue almost unexampled in political history.

That stronghold of individual liberty, the judiciary itself, has time and again been invaded and overcome by the spirit of partisan rule— a power greater and more despotic than was ever wielded by any Stuart of them all. In the Supreme Court of the United States it compelled a partisan and unrighteous division of opinion in the Dred Scott case. In the same court, two judges were appointed for the express purpose (according to common belief) of reversing a previous fully considered and solemnly made decision of that court on the constitutionality of the legal tender act. The decision was reversed, and the London Times declared, in effect, that no high court of judicature in any Anglo-Saxon country had ever before so disgraced itself. In the Electoral Commission, the judges of the same court, selected with a confident belief of all parties that some, at least, of them, by virtue of their high office, were far above partisanship, divided in opinion as they were respectively named Democrat or Republican.

No great war has arisen in which the Government has not found within the country a powerful organization, thwarting its steps in many important particulars; undermining its great reserve force of patriotic, moral support, by incitement to fanatical distrust. And although some men in every country may be found lukewarm toward the support of the government of their country in such an emergency, they are insignificant in power and number compared with the multitude (otherwise fair

Whether or not he was right in sketching corruption and incapacity in this harmless light may be answered by each man for himself, and will be answered mainly according as he hopes to obtain office through the "machine." For my part, I see, in common with thousands of persons in the country, literate and illiterate, high and low, that corruption and incapacity under our present system are forming a most permanent bond of union among the vast majority of politicians. They may not transmit their power, in all cases, directly to their flesh and blood children, as corrupt and incompetent aristocracies would, for such children may not be in the true line of descent. But there is a line of descent as clearly marked and certain. The power goes, by our system, to the next generation of corruptibles and incapables.

Many well meaning persons habitually answer the foregoing, "Pessimist and croaker, the system is good enough. The fault lies in the large number of ignorant persons at present exercising the right of suffrage. But the common schools may be expected to educate the children of such persons into good citizens, which will purify our. politics in their day." This apotheosis of common school education is very effective, especially with persons who possess only such an education, and are but slightly addicted to original thought. The general spread of primary education has done great things, and can do much for America. But there are things it cannot do. It did not prevent China from standing still for centuries, because, although it has been almost universal there during that time, it was not in the right direction morally. It leaned too much toward satisfaction with itself and its sufficiency for the purpose of carrying on the government. The government obtained extraordinary; permanency because of its aid; but custom, thus so powerfully established in so important a factor in the national life, bound the national mind in shackles which inflexibly retracted its moral and intellectual growth. If the general spread of the minor branches of knowledge, at all times and under all circumstances, insures national progress, why is not China the foremost nation of the globe to-day? It is a fact, which nobody can dispute, that for the last ten years, at least, there has hardly been a Legislature in any State in the United States against which charges of bribery have not been openly made. Yet our legislators had the benefit of the general spread of education; few of them were absolutely illiterate. Politics were corrupt, and the men did not need to be better than it was the custom to be. If politics remain corrupt (and the certain growth of large corporations, private

wealth, and financial enterprises of all sorts, will keep them corrupt, unless we make a great change)—if the rising generation of Americans are accustomed to hear such charges daily, to find one party but little better than another, to see men in high place known to be corrupt, and to have achieved their position despite their characters will that generation not also deem "smartness" far more essential than integrity or capability in public affairs, and will the common school education save them from so thinking? It has not saved their political fathers. This reasoning will also apply to the great evil of excessive and continually changing legislation, which, even in De Tocqueville's day, led him to make the following prediction:

"It may be apprehended that men perpetually thwarted in their designs by the mutability of legislation will learn to look upon republican institutions as an inconvenient form of society; the evil resulting from the instability of the secondary enactments might then raise a doubt as to the nature of the fundamental principles of the constitution, and indirectly bring about a revoluton. But this epoch is still very remote."

At the time this was written there had been but one revision of the original State constitutions. If De Tocqueville had lived to see the numerous experiments in legislation since made, notwithstanding a half century of the common school system; to hear the tone of easy contempt for almost all politicians and political efforts adopted by the rising generation; to see labor riots all over the country, and the steady growth of a class of intelligent persons in the large cities abstaining from voting-he would not have looked for some revolution at a remote epoch. Above all things he would have said: The spread of common school education has not checked excessive legislation hitherto; how can it be expected to limit it in the next generation?

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, whom everybody must admit to be a clear and cautious thinker, cannot see much to be hoped for in the future, with respect to true liberty, from the indefinite increase on the American Continent of numbers of essentially small-minded but thoroughly self-satisfied persons, and continually suggests to us that, notwithstanding the best the common schools may do,

-"the number of people able to carry on anything like a systematic train of thought, or to grasp the bearings of any subject consisting of several parts, will always necessarily be exceedingly small in every country, compared to the whole population. *** The incalculable majority of men form opinions without the consciousness that they have reached them by intellectual processes correctly performed, but are attached to them because they suit their tempers and meet their wishes, and

not solely and in so far as they believe themselves warranted by evidence in believing them true; whereas the work of governing a great nation"—

(and in the United States of the future we must necessarily have one of the most complex governments that ever existed)

-"requires an immense amount of special knowledge, and the steady, restrained, and calm exertion of a great variety of the very best talents which are to be found in it."

A very large number of persons who possess these talents, and are willing to devote them to their country's service, are now excluded from any possibility of doing so; and the tendency with the immense majority of half-educated people is, and always will be, either to doubt the existence of any such persons, or to deny the possibility of any better knowledge than their own on political matters-on the principle by which they maintain their religious views. Thus thousands of talented men, who in a smaller state would materially aid the government, in so great a nation (though still more essential) may be buried alive, and their influence weakened by the half educated masses.

Finally, Mr. Ezra Seaman (to my mind a very accurate and observing man), in speaking of the destiny of the United States as its waste places fill up, points out that

-"the success of the Territories has been owing to the great natural wealth and resources of the country, the virtues of the public land system, the munificent dona

tions of Congress, rather than to any great wisdom in their Territorial legislation. The shocking election frauds and abuses, and the barbarous legislation, in Kansas, involved the Territory in civil war, and showed that the heterogeneous mass of people that settle new Territories are poorly qualified either to make good laws or maintain order and peace—which is quite a different thing."

He deprecates the absurd confidence felt in the permanency of our Government under the present mode of conducting it, and points out that

-"we must reform our system of elections and representation, and thereby make our Government a government of the whole people, instead of a government of the leaders of the dominant party; we must revive a spirit of patriotism and respect for the workings of our Government, and arrest the downward course of corruption and prodigality. That we shall continue to in

crease in numbers and industry, commerce and wealth, for a half century or more to come is certain, but unless these reforms are effected in our Government, our national interests will become so numerous and incongruous, our population so heterogeneous; the national character and sentiments, religious views and aspira

tions of the people of different sections so discordant, the bonds of union so weak; corruption and profligacy so rank and bold, and sectional and class ambition so

rampant, that the American Congress will become a jarring and discordant mob, and it will be impossible to reconcile its elements, and prevent the flames of civil war from bursting forth, perhaps in several sections at the same time, with the eventual result of the division of the national territory into several different nations."

That I am right in asserting the imminence of a change, or changes, in American government, many things in our public sentiments and conduct abundantly prove. All revolutions proceed from a desire to put better men in office; and thus they are rightfully thought a part of the upward tendency of humanity. It would take a volume to enumerate all the signs of change. It suffices to ask, why do so many thinking men among us complain from day to day of the exclusion from political life of the best men among us, and point to the present constitution of parties as the cause? Books have multiplied on the subject. "How can we get the best work of our best men in our public offices?" is the cry of one class. And from the other extreme, in the midst of actual and threatened riot, we hear the baffled howl, "Democratic thieves and Republican robbers." If we had no other analogy, this is singularly like the phenomena which preceded the French Revolution. The thinkers and the proletariat alike decry the present state of things, and long for something better. There is nothing to fear, however, from the analogy. I, for one, see other signs in the times than this. I do not for a moment doubt the substantial and proud perpetuation of American democracy. These things, nevertheless, show the fears of thoughtful men, and the impulses of men who suffer. A state of society in which the best men rise to the top is the aim of both cries-of every movement that ever amounted to anything in political conduct. That this has been the steady aim of the American people for the past eighty years, their complaints, as I have before stated,

distinctly prove. And that they did not earlier

bend all their energies to its attainment is due, so far as I can discern the philosophy of history, to the fact that in that period they have have had other overshadowing work to perform, and by no means to apathy. It is a reason well in keeping with the practical turn of AngloSaxon communities for self-government. It is taking one thing at a time, and selecting the most important thing for the present time—a markedly Anglo-Saxon trait, giving promise of stability-as distinguished from undertaking to bring about the millennium at once, which we rather unkindly call Mexicanization-giving promise of instability. The great work of the first century of national existence is nobly accomplished. Already the glaring signs which