The Sun.
London, England, 1869-04-08 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, 111URSDAir EVENING, APRIL 8, 1.69.

REFORM OF THE UNITED STATES CIVIL

SERVICE.

(From the Anglo-American Times.)

The New York Iribune approves of the American
system by which every change of administration is
followed by a change in the incumbents of all
offices. That paper thus writes :
"Washington reports affirm the existence of a per-
sistent pressure upon heads of departments by members
of Congress for places wherewith to reward needy con-
stituents. In so far as these demands involve merely the
supersedure of ins by outs, we do not regret it. Rotation
in office is generally wholesome, even, to those who dis-
relibh it. No department clerk who is worth his salt
ought to remain in office more than four years at furthest.
Let young, active, energetic workers be appointed to
clerkships; let each understand that he is to be retained
but four years, and be admonished to save at least one-
third of his earnings from the outset ; let him go with
the Administration that appointed him, having saved the
means wherewith to start in some private business (set-
tling and working a quarter-section of public land, if he
can do no better); and let the next brood follow in the
footsteps of its predecessor."
It is astonishing to see the system upheld in the
very article in which the mischief it creates is de-
nounced. The clerk is to understand that he is to
make the most of his four years of office. With
that " most " he may settle on a quarter-sec-
tion of public land. Cannot the Tribune see that
the former is a direct incentive to plunder, and that
the latter places a man in the very position for which
hisprevious training has completely disqualified him.
He who has got the office, and knows he can at best
but hold it for four years, loses with every week the
dread of the punishment involved in being turned
out of it. His activity for the Government can
bring no good to himself, but his activity for him-
self against the Government may be productive of
material advantage. He gets his office by unscru-
pulously serving his party, and he uses his office
unscrupulously to serve himself ; thus a young, ac-
tive, energetic worker, who under more favourable
circumstances might have proved an honest man,
is trained at the threshold of his career to be a
rascal. After teaching him the value of having a
country to sell, and unfitting him for agricultural
work by four years departmental employment, the
Tribune would place the clerk on a quarter-section ;
and a more incongruous connection it is really diffi-
cult to conceive.
" it is the crying evil of our day that working for the
public pays better, or is supposed to pay better, than work-
ing for yourself. The farmer's or the mechanic's son
would rather be an Inspector of Customs or Police-
man than his father's business and follow it, The soil is
neglected and often deserted, because those who should
cultivate it fancy they can do better as tide-waiters or
Post-office clerks. The laws and the policy which beguile
them into that delusion have very much to answer for."
And what are the laws and policy but those the
Tribune thus describes To the victors belong
the spoils of the vanquished, is the accepted maxim,
and we submit, only protesting that it is not the people
and their Treasury who are rightfully vanquished."
Can Horace Greeley really suppose that the winning
party is to have its pap, but that none of the plun-
der is to be extracted from the public. If not from
the public—then from whom? Householders might
as well keep up a school for training burglars, and
then whine over their invaded premises and ab-
stracted valuables. "Vie have demonstrated,"says
the Tribune in another article entitled the " Siege
of the White House," " that nine out of ten of the
office seekers must be disappointed, and must re-
turn to their residences (if they have any) with
broken hearts and pockets hopelessly empty. To
say nothing of self-respect, and that personal dignity
which every gentleman should strive to maintain,
we have proved, though proof was hardly needed,
that there are very few offices the emoluments of
which are equal to the honest wants of honest
daily work in ordinary departments of human in-
dustry ; that dependence upon the public patron.

age is almost sure to be fatal to a muscular
self-reliance ; and that superannuation is almost

sure to find an office-holder, who is usually bled by
his party unmercifully and by his friends heroically,
as needy in the end as he was in the beginning."
A picture is drawn of the fools who know not the

difference between shade and substance, who every
four years pursue the beautiful bubbles. Might
not this pursuit be connected with the stupendous
fracds in the collection of the revenue ? The
salaries of officials compare as but a fraction
with the sum out of which the nation is swindled

by their connivance. The fo,ols may be running
after the bubbles, but the beautiful illusions are
the rascals living in luxury, who, from their offi,:es,
have realized fortunes. There is something more
than bubbles to be got out of these posts, and there
are some substantial proofs of the fact. The
Tribune may rely on it that the Civil Service can

never be iefor-med until it becomes a profes-
sion for which lads are trained, and in which
they rise by good conduct, qualifications, and
length of service, as they do in the Navy and Army.
In one article it asserts that no clerk worth his
salt ought to wish for office beyond four years ; in
another, that no person worth his salt ought to
wish for oflice at all ; in a third, that General Grant
is absolutely borne down before the solid phalanx
of those who do wish for office ' • that they have
settled over Washington as grasshoppers in Utah;
that the Departments are clogged with them and
their applications, the White House besieged, and
that business has been almost brought to a stand-
still by their importunities. And from what do the
eager hosts arise if not from the rotation system
in force ? This is the most apparent effect, though
it is by far the least to be deplored. Another is
thus described :

"if we could only dispel the too prevalent illusion that
the public service is a political alms-house wherein the
lame, and the halt, and the paralytic are 'to be fed and
fattened at the public cost, the needed reform would be
easy. But almost every one has a brother, or cousin, or
son, or nephew, who doesn't seem to know how to take
care of himself, hence is presumed admirably calculated
to officiate as a guardian of the public interests and
welfare."

While making such a fuss about the bad results,
' how is it that the Tribune can be so blind to the
cause? Any one acquainted with the administra-
tion of other Governments knows that the Ameri-
can system must breed corruption, and the Tribune
may go on deploring the corruption and the useless-
ness of the mass of candidates without changing
that result so long as the system that produces it
is upheld. Why should the army and the navy be
conducted on a different plan from the Civil Ser-
vice ? Do not most of the offices require as special
training and qualifications, many of them such as
in the Patent,. the Land Surveying, and other
bureaux in a higher degree? and, if so, why should
these be open to the idiotic, the halt and the
blind, any more than the command of war ships,
of regiments, and of divisions? The security of
the tenure tends, according to the Tribune, to make
men fossils ; but experience has shown that pro-
motion is the best incentive to work, and the higher
the value attached by the incumbent to his post
the better the guarantee for the honest admiuistra- '
tion of its duties, and there is no such value as
security. It is certain that the present system has
worked badly, indeed so badly that most men are
convinced that Mr. Jenckes's bill ought at least to
be tried. If we sought an instance against Grant's
saying that the right way to get a bad law repealed
lies in its vigorous enforcement, we would find it
here, for the rule upheld by the Tribune, that to the
victor belongs the spoils, has worked infamously,
and has been productive of enormous injury, yet it
has created an interest perhaps powerful enough to
keep it in force against the wish of the President
and of the majority of the people.

This paragraph from the Waterford News gives
an instance of the rights of property, while it suggests
that property may have duties as well. A man commits a
sin, outrages the laws, and flies the country ; he is a great
territorial magnate, and his establishment is broken up,
his servants are suddenly and unexpectedly discharged,
and the estates on which be has resided cease to benefit
by an expenditure by which they had boon fostered, and
which will continue to draw everything from them, while
it returns nothing :—" The Marquis of Waterford.—We
regret to learn that, owing to a recent deplorable event,
the establishment of the Marquis of Waterford, at Our-
raghmore House, will be broken up, all the servants, with
the exce[tion of two, having received notice that their
services are no longer required. The absence of a resi-
dent nobleman, who spent so much of his time at the fa-
mily residence, will be felt seriously in the locality."
Mr. George G. Fogg, late United States Minister
to Switzerland, contradicts the statement of Mr. Smalley
that Mr. Hale, the American Minister to Spain, is not cn
good terms with the members of the Spanish Government,
or that he sympathizes with the late Queen of Spain and
wishes for her return.

The new President of Harvard College is Pro-
fessor Charles W. Eliot, of an old Boston family, son of
Samuel A. Eliot. He graduated at Harvard iu 1853, and
is about 38 years old; he afterwards held the place of
tutor and of professor in the college, and has been for
some time a professor in the Institute of Technology. His
specialty is physical science, but he isli"good g'eneral
scholar, and has lately attracted notice as a writer on
education.

THE EMIGRANT SHIP "JAMES FOSTER,
JUNIOR."

(From the Anglo-American Times.)
The sea has always furnished a prolific field for
adventure, and the one from which novelists have
drawn most largely ; but as imagination only fol-
lows in the footsteps of natural events, the story-
teller but seeks there, as the ocean supplies the most
thrilling incidents. The narratives are various, and
all tend towards horror. The winter just closed
has been noted as one of the stormiest known on
the Atlantic. With almost the regularity, force,
and continuance of a monsoon, westerly gales have
blown over the British Isles, and the logs of
ships prove that these gales have extended far
over the Atlantic. The Pereire furnished an
instance of a mail packet almost buried under
a huge wave, returning shattered from the
dreadful encounter; the Hibernia gives the disas-
trous tale of a great steamship going down in mid-
ocean ; and now comes another story even more
horrible. The American ship James Foster, Junior,
left Liverpool on the 14th of last December, with
146 steerage passengers, bound to New York. The
weather she encountered may be gathered from the
fact that the passage occupied twelve weeks, as she
only arrived at Sandy Hook on the Bth of March.
Having typhoid fever on board she was placed in
quarantine, and most of the surviving passengers
were sent to hospital. Out of the total number
but 36 were considered to be in good health. The
Emigration Commissioners inquired into the treat-
ment they had received in the ship, and a harrow-
ing tale of cruelty was then revealed. Each emi-
grant was allowed about 24 square feet of room,
but it was not the space to which objection was
made. Raw food was served weekly, the emigrants
having to cook it for themselves at the ship's
galley. In such weather it was impossible to
comply, and in consequence, even had the food
been sufficient, it would have been useless to many.
Without the ordinary necessaries of life the un-
fortunate people remained huddled together in in-
describable filth, which bred a pestilence, and struck
down the crew as well as the passengers. A ship,
helplessly rolling and pitching in the cold wintry
gales of the Atlantic, with such a freight, is suffi-
ciently appalling; yet we have told but half our
story. In cabins luxuriously fitted up, and in
strange contrist with the bunks between decks,
lived officers, whose time appears to have been
spent in aggravating, not in mitigating, the suffer-
ings of the wretches committed to their care.
Accepting as true the evidence on which they
have been arrested and held for trial, Captain
Armstrong, his mates, the boatswain, carpenter,
steward, and even the surgeon, were banded in con
spiracy against the lives of -
the passengers and
crew. The carpenter and the boatswain appear to
have been peculiarly active in maltreating all, and
to their brutality several deaths are attributed.
Emigrants aro often deluded by an abatement of
passage money into signing articles to ship as sea-
men, being told they would never be required to
go aloft, only to work on deck, in aid of the watch.
When at sea the boatswain, armed with a belaying
pin, orders the long-shoresman aloft to reef or un-
furl sails, and the application of the iron to his
head either ends in his going above or in his being
clrried insensible below. In the James Foster
they stood on no such ceremony as having signed
shipping papers, but used compulsion freely in
getting the passengers to aid in working the ship.
Nor were they restricted by their contract as re-
garded the provisions. For one week nothing but
meal was issued, two pints a day, with a spoonful
of sugar, and the English portion were soon re-
duced to a state of starvation, when they had to
buy biscuits at a shilling each from the Germans,
who appear to have made such a provision. Com-
plaints of the food were answered with curses, and
those who carried these remonstrances to the cap-
tain were driven away with violence. The work
was mostly done by the passengers thus fed on
meal and with about a pint of water a day. It is
surprising that not more than 22 passengers and
sailors died during the voyage, but the effect in
sending 88 fever patients into the State Emigrant
Refuge and Hospital on arrival was the natural
result, and there others have died. The
stories of the cruelties are appalling ; indeed
they resolve themselves into cases of downright
murder. A sick cabin boy was drawn to the upper
deck by a rope, where
night, and died.exposed during the
One of the men, a
passenger
cook, was kicked from the hospital by the carpenter,
he lay
who required him to draw water. When he went on
board he was strong and healthy, but they buried
him in the Atlantic. The carpenter issued the pro-
visions ; and he was a man whom the combined testi-
mony of every one describes as of a cruel disposition,
and in all his excesses he was backed by the captain.
The treatment of the sailors was somewhat similar.
One night two emigrants concealed themselves on
the quarter-deck when the passengers had been sent
below, and they saw the officers lay hold of White,
ei me
sarsrtireidd e a spar, from which he
w
sc
sr
se acms
sst,
loose
l at soh
bh
a sailor, fill his mouth with soap to prevent his
to the hospital, where
he died, and was thrown overboard. John 0.
Southard died shortly after the arrival of the ship,
but he lived long enough to testify against the third
mate as the author of the injuries which bad ended
so fatally to him. It is astonishing how generally
an example of such fearful cruelty can be followed.
The steward is quite a lad, yet he pursued an un-
fortunate boy around the deck, beating him with a
belaying pin till he had rendered him insensible,
and from this state he was only carried to his grave.
The ship's surgeon calls himself Mr. Monument, a
native of Norfolk, holding a diploma from the Royal
College of Surgeons, and formerly medical officer of
the ship Great Webster. He alleged that his medi-
cines were • furnished by the London Society,
and as no such society in London for furnish-
ing medicines is known of in New York, nor
any such vessel as the Great Webster, doubts are
entertained of the truth of his story. Ile is about
50 years of age, with too rich an Irish brogue for a
Norfolk man. His prescriptions were alleged to
have been orders to have his patients flogged ; the
amount of medicine he dispensed was limited to
two doses of castor oil. When the real character of
the treatment received by the passengers transpired,
the third mate, carpenter, and boatswain were
arrested, and the captain and first mate were dis-
covered, after a diligent search by the police.
Armstrong's wife asserted that he was very ill, which
the police discovered to be the case. Both he and
the mate had been stricken with this typhoid fever,
and the captain then was delirious. Some days
before he reached New York he complained to his
brother, the first mate, who, with the carpenter,
has also been stricken with this fever, that he was
unwell, but on arrival he was able to walk to his
home in Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn. After recover-
ing, a narrative of the outrages which he saw in
the newspapers threw him back. He asserted these
accounts to be false .
and under the excitement
they produced he relapsed, never rallying, till he
died in the arms of his old steward, March 17, his
-last words being, "Louis Lee, if you had been with
me this would never have occurred." The place where
the passengers slept is about eight feet high, and
presented anything but an inviting aspect; for days
after it had been scoured and fumigated, the smell
remained, and the visitor could scarcely endure the
atmosphere. The Commissioners of Emigration
have taken up the subject, the attention of the
nation having been strongly directed towards it,
and as the vessel sails under American colours those
who perpetrated the cruelties are likely to receive a
lesson which will prove a warning to others. Sailing
ships should not be permitted to carry emigrants,
for such a system of treatment as that practised in
the James Foster may be prolonged till it has become
fatal, or at least to injure permanently the consti-
tutions of the sufferers. However bad might be the
treatment on board a steamer, the run is too quickly
made, to prove so serious. Although a law cannot
be enacted to prevent a sailing ship from carrying
such passengers as choose to take berths, condi-
tions may be imposed for their comfort and protec-
tion, which would effectually prevent sailing ves-
sels from competing with steamers. The James
Foster will probably give the death-blow to the car-
riage of emigrants in vessels relying alone on sails.
The advantage—even economy—of selecting
steamers has long and generally been seen. In
1856 the total number of passengers brought by
22 steamers was 5,111, but in 1868 184,941 were
carried in 378 steamers, while the ratio by sailing
Thehad decreased in a corresponding degree.
attention, too, of the Republic has now been
fastened on the best mOde of protecting emigrants
at sea, and this will perhaps lead to conventions
with other nations, especially Belgium.

MISCELLANEOUS NEWS.

CLUB-LAND.

The Owl says that at the last general meeting of
tin, Carlton Club it was decided to request Lord
Derby and Mr. Disraeli to sit for their pictures, with
a view to commencing a gallery of eminent Con-
servative statesmen, to be preserved in the club. It
is not to be inferred from this request that the club
considers Mr. Disraeli to bear the same relation
to the Conservative party as Lord Derby does,
that of (to adopt Masonic initials) P.G.M.
The Owl gives another item of news from club-
land. " The unusual prevalence of blackballing in
many of the London clubs has recently given rise to
much remark. The practice has obtained to such an
extent during this spring at one of the oldest clubs
in St. James's-street that it has been decided to hold
.a general meeting to consider the whole subject of
election of candidates, pending which no ballot
is to be taken." Some time ago there
was a quarrel at the Reform Club between
the members of two professions. At first all the
candidates of one profession found themselves black-
balled, and when this was discovered, their friends
took to doing the same kind office for the friends of
the blackballers. Matters became serious, and we
believe that there is now peace. But which is the
club referred to by the Owl P "One of the oldest
clubs in St. James's-street" may mean either Brooks's
or White's—may mean either that another quarrel
has broken out among the'Whigs, or that the Tories
have followed the example of their rivals.