The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1868-12-05


the canvass refused steadily to contract obli-
cations to anybody for helping to get him
elected. Anybody who "worked for Grant"
therefore, did so on his own responsibility; so
that Grant can now meet all Republican ora
tors, writers, and bill-stIckers, drummers,
scene-shifters, stage carpenters, and rollers of
thunde barrels with an unolouded brow and
a sense of perfect independence. The re-
suit is that there is an extraordinary and
almost unprecedented absence of rumors
about Offices; an almost unprecedented
scarcity of Office. seekers in Washington. In
the course of the next year we confidently ex-
pect to see the theory that the present system
of appointment to Office has any thing pecu-
liarly american" about it, or that any con-
siderable portion of the public is attached to
it, proved to be fallaoy and thoroughly eX-
ploded. The number of persons who take
any real interest in the present system, or
would mourn for one hour over its destruc-
tion, is in reality exceedingly small and it
forms a class without the least weight in the
community, either as regards character or
ability. The doctrine, too, that there is
something peculiarly democratic in rota-
tion in ofice-that is, in the periodical dis
missal of one set of public servants for the
purpose of giving fresh batch Of citizens a
share in the profits of politics-is one which
has equally little hold on the popular mind
and the success which those who live by it
have had in persuading people that the coun-
try was attached to it is simply striking
illustration Of what may be done by noise aud
impudence. This success thus far has been
due simply to the fact that the exceedingly
small amount of work which fell to the share
OF the Federal Government before the war
prevented the denominations of the system
from staring people in the face as they do now,
though it did not prevent people from con-
sidering Offce-holders and ofhce-seekers as on
the whole a shiftless class.
The only argument we have seen anywhere
put forward against reform is that it will ruin
the Republican party, by leaving them nothing
to offer those who do the work of eectoneerng
by way of reward. We believe, on the con
trary, that it will simply substitute good
class of workers for a very bad class. 1t will
cause, no doubt, the retirement in disgust of a
large number of wire-pullers and orators of
the baser sort but, on the other hand, it will
bring into the field larger and larger number
of the men who built up the Republican
party and who now keep it alve-those
who have faith in its ideas, and who belong
to it not as an end but as a means-aud a
larger and larger number of men devoted to
practical legislation, who, like Mr. Jenckes, have
made conscientious study OF subjects, and
want to use the party as means of putting
their conceptions into practice. The men,
even now, who do the party most service du-
ring a canvass are not men who entertain any
expectation of reward in the shape of Federal
offices. They are either men who have al
ready won, or who are seeking by honorable
acts, such honors as the people can bestow by
election, or else men for whom no Office what
ever has any attraction, and who serve on the
stump, as many of them had served in the
field, for the sake of the famous sold Cause
for which Sydney prayed on the scaffold, and
which in our day seems to run as much risk
from kpaves and blatherskites as in other days
it ran from kings and priests.