Staunton spectator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1849-1896, 1877-07-10

THE PRESIDENTS CIVIL SERVICE
ORDER.-The order of President Hayes
prohibiting officers of the United States
from taking an active part in politics
strikes directly at the root of a gigantic
abuse. This does not, as is assumed by
the New York Sun, make slaves of
them but on the contrary releases them
from the slavery of party-leaving them,
of course, free in their opinions and
votes. The interference of office-hold-
ers in politics has worked incalculable
injury to the right of Independent &C.
ton, to the suffrage, and to the proper
administration of governmental affairs.
Any restrictions, therefore, that con-
fines such persons to their official duties
and interdicts active partisanship can
not be otherwise than beneficial. If the
observance of this order can be enforced
the cause of civil service reform will be
materially helped by it. Those who
make a profession of politics do SO in
the expectation that it will lead to Of
fee. Their success in packing caucuses,
making nominations, manipulating pri-
maries, and helping the election of their
candidates at the polls by all those arts
and devices in which such active parti-
sans are adopts, has heretofore been re-
garded as giving them a valid claim to
such offices as the party in power may
have the distribution of. It is the
ground upon which every applicant
for place has been in the habit of putting
his right for political recognition, and
so far as the supply of offices would meet
the demand the appointments have
been very generally used as q set off for
services rendered. The first thing, there
fore, that professional politicians have
had to do has been to work for an office.
The next to merit retention in office by
active partisanship. But if Office is
hereafter to be made the reward of mer-
it, and retention in Office is to be based
on abstention from active politics and
fidelity to the duties that are devolved
on the incumbent, and also on honesty
and capacity, as the old Jeffersonian
formula prescribed, machine politics
viii! soon become thing of the past,
and it will be possible, as in the earliest
days of the republic, to elect our ablest
and purest men as legislators, and to
build up by degrees a civil service under
chiefs the fittest to conduct the affairs
of the departments they have been
chosen to manage, and with subordi-
mates honest and competent and dill
gent. We do not say it is quite possi-
BILE to elevate our civil service to this
happy condition, or that in the chances
and changes of parties some unfit men
may not creep into office and some
rogues be guilty of fraud, collision with
outside sharpers, or of peculatiOn more
or less serious. But it is clear that there
can be no civil service reform that will
work any appreciable good until office
holders are interdicted from meddling
in politics, and the men who ''run the
machine" are made to understand that
their political partisanship, however
strong and pronounced it may be,
gives them no claim to offices they are
morally and Intellectually untitled to
fill. President Hayes deserves credit
for the PRONUNCIATION of an order that
knocks the cogs out of machine" pol
itics, and it is noteworthy in this con-
nection that if such an order had been
in force at the last presidential election
1t would have changed the composition
OF the Louisiana returning board, and,
with the elimination of Wells, Mr..
Hayes might not have been Counted
n."-Bdltinlore San.