but it was accustomed by its English tradition and descent always to hear the Tories cry that the Constitution was in danger when the Whigs were in power, and the Whigs under a Tory administration to shout that all was lost.  It heard the uproar like the old lady upon her first railroad journey, who sat serene amid the wreck of a collision, and when asked if she was much hurt, looked over her spectacles and answered, blandly, “Hurt?  Why, I supposed they always stopped so in this kind of travelling.”  The feeling that the denunciation was only a part of the game of politics, and no more to be accepted as a true statement than Snug the joiner as a true lion, was confirmed by the fact that when the Whig opposition came into power with President Harrison, it adopted the very policy which under Democratic administration it had strenuously denounced as fatal.  The pressure for place was even greater than it had been ten years before, and although Mr. Webster as Secretary of State maintained his consistency by putting his name to an executive order asserting sound principles, the order was swept away like a lamb by a locomotive.

Nothing but a miracle, said General Harrison’s attorney-general, can feed the swarm of hungry office-seekers.

Adopted by both parties, Mr. Marcy’s doctrine that the places in the public service are the proper spoils of a victorious party, was accepted as a necessary condition of popular government.  One of the highest officers of the government expounded this doctrine to me long afterwards.  “I believe,” said he, “that when the people vote to change a party administration they vote to change every person of the opposite party who holds a place, from the President of the United States to the messenger at my door.”  It is this extraordinary but sincere misconception of the function of party in a free government that leads to the serious defence of the spoils system.  Now, a party is merely a voluntary association of citizens to secure the enforcement of a certain policy of administration upon which they are agreed.  In a free government this is done by the election of legislators and of certain executive officers who are friendly to that policy.  But the duty of the great body of persons employed in the minor administrative places is in no sense political.  It is wholly ministerial, and the political opinions of such persons affect the discharge of their duties no more than their religious views or their literary preferences.  All that can be justly required of such persons, in the interest of the public business, is honesty, intelligence, capacity, industry, and due subordination; and to say that, when the policy of the Government is changed by the result of an election from protection to free-trade, every book-keeper and letter-carrier and messenger and porter in the public offices ought to be a free-trader, is as wise as to say that if a merchant is a Baptist every clerk in his office ought to be a believer in total immersion.  But the officer of whom I spoke undoubtedly expressed the general feeling.  The necessarily evil consequences of the practice which he justified seemed to be still speculative and inferential, and to the national indifference which followed the war the demand of Mr. Jenckes for reform appeared to be a mere whimsical vagary most inopportunely introduced.