to unite to suppress this gigantic evil which threatens the republic.  Conspicuous reformers sit in the Cabinet; and in this sorrowful moment, at least, the national heart and mind and conscience, stricken and bowed by a calamity whose pathos penetrates every house-hold in Christendom, cries to these warning words, “Amen!  Amen!” Like the slight sound amid the frozen silence of the Alps that loosens and brings down the avalanche, the solitary pistol-shot of the 2d of July has suddenly startled this vast accumulation of public opinion into conviction, and on every side thunders the rush and roar of its overwhelming descent, which will sweep away the host of evils bred of this monstrous abuse.

This is an extraordinary change for twelve years, but it shows the vigorous political health, the alert common-sense, and the essential patriotism of the country, which are the earnest of the success of any wise reform.  The war which naturally produced the lassitude and indifference to the subject which were evident twelve years ago had made reform, indeed, a vital necessity, but the necessity was not then perceived.  The dangers that attend a vast system of administration based to its least detail upon personal patronage were not first exposed by Mr. Jenckes in 1867, but before that time they had been mainly discussed as possibilities and inferences.  Yet the history of the old New York council of appointment had illustrated in that State the party fury and corruption which patronage necessarily breeds, and Governor McKean in Pennsylvania, at the close of the last century, had made “a clean sweep” of the places within his power.  The spoils spirit struggled desperately to obtain possession of the national administration from the day of Jefferson’s inauguration to that of Jackson’s, when it succeeded.  Its first great but undesigned triumph was the decision of the First Congress in 1789, vesting the sole power of removal in the President, a decision which placed almost every position in the Civil Service unconditionally at his pleasure.  This decision was determined by the weight of Madison’s authority.  But Webster, nearly fifty years afterwards, opposing his authority to that of Madison, while admitting the decision to have been final, declared it to have been wrong.  The year 1820, which saw the great victory of slavery in the Missouri Compromise, was also the year in which the second great triumph of the spoils system was gained, by the passage of the law which, under the plea of securing greater responsibility in certain financial offices, limited such offices to a term of four years.  The decision of 1789, which gave the sole power of removal to the President, required positive executive action to effect removal; but this law of 1820 vacated all the chief financial offices, with all the places dependent upon them, during the term of every President, who, without an order of removal, could fill them all at his pleasure.