The Portland daily press., 1877-08-31
From the N. Y. Tribune.]
Civil Service Discussions.

Gail Hamilton concludes in this MORNINGS
Tribune the most brilliant and the most
widely read series OF criticisms ever contrib
uted by woman's pen to the literature of
American politics. In recent letters she has
been treating questions of legal and Congress
sional right; but to-day she returns to more
pungent details, and for the first time stops
to deal with her assailants. Mr.. Samuel
Bowles. Mr.. Medill, Gen. Schurz, the New
York Euening Post, the Aduertiser and the
Journal of Boston, all receive her notice, and
emerge in turn, each more or less dilapidated,
from the attention. Mr.. Bowles fares par
ticularly i'll. The relentless critic, after vim
dicating her first assertions, strikes to the
marrow OF his character in a single sem
tence:
labor in the Republican Office is that the gen.
tleman whom the Editor-in-chief does not
know is to be sandered by his subord:nates,
while his personal friends are reserved to be
slandered by himself.
No other political contributions have of
Iate years attracted anything like the edito =
rial attention given these letters, and yet in
its treatment of them the American Press
has not always shown itself at its best. Many
of the assailants have misconstrted the real
point of the discussion. Gail Hamilton never
once undertook to state the acts of the Ad-
ministration or to furnish the facts on which
her censure rested. What she did was to
take up the stories promulgated by Reform
newspapers themselves, at the very time
when they were chanting paans to the new
Administration, and to show how inconsis-
tent was the news they printed with the
eulogy they based upon it. She did not say
she knew their news to be true; she did not
say she thought their eulogy to be undeserved
but she did show how poorly the news and
the eulogy fitted together in the same paper.
To hold her Irresponsible f2r their news was
silly, while to evade responsibility for some
decent relation between their news and their
eulogy was dishonest; but too many of Ler
not over-ciVil critics have done one or both.
Little else has bee said to break the force
of her articles, unless in the story that Mr..
Blaine wrote them for her, or inspired them,
with which she deals to-day after her own
fashion, or in the sneer that at any rate she
is herself just as mercenary as the professors
of unselfish politics she has transfiXed, since,
of course, the Tribune hired her to do the
work. On the last point it is pertinent now
to print the essential part of the private letter
to the editor of this journal, in which she
gave the first hint of her desire to publish
the series OF communications to-day con-
cluded, and made the only business arrange
ment that has ever existed about them:
have written series of papers on Civil
Service Reform, going straight and slam
against the grain, yours and everybody else's
who is IN the gall of bitterness and the bonds
OF lniquity like you. l both censure and praise
the administration as is meet, and, in short,
deal out exact and equal justice to everybody.
AS they would bear my own name you would
not be answerable for the opinions. And if,
after they are published, children cry for them
and you should Want to pay me tritia OF Sl0,-
600 or so, you might, or if you didn't you
mghth't. 1 should at least have the satistac-
tion OF. having done missionary work on good
heather ground.
She has done the missionary work with a
courage and power that her assailants envy
while they SANDER, and it is already bearing
fruit. There is perceptibly less gush than
there was about the administration, and a
more serious sense of the exacting response
biity of the time. We are no longer pre-
dieting impossibilities, or praising success and
blunder with equal and undiscriminating
ardor. What Mr.. Lincoln used to call "this
business of proclamating" has been measure.
bly, stopped. And the more distinctly the
occasional errors of his subordinates are
recognized, the more distinctly appear also
the sincerity, the disinterestedness and the
patriotic purpose of President for whom
we believe great .work In American politics
is yet reserved.