It is easy to assert that the reform of the Civil Service is an executive reform.  So it is.  But the Executive alone cannot accomplish it.

The abuses are now completely and aggressively organized, and the sturdiest President would quail before them.  The President who should undertake, single-handed, to deal with the complication of administrative evils known as the Spoils System would find his party leaders in Congress and their retainers throughout the country arrayed against him; the proposal to disregard traditions and practices which are regarded as essential to the very existence and effectiveness of party organization would be stigmatized as treachery, and the President himself would be covered with odium as a traitor.  The air would hum with denunciation.  The measures he should favor, the appointments he might make, the recommendations of his secretaries, would be opposed and imperilled, and the success of his administration would be endangered.  A President who should alone undertake thoroughly to reform the evil must feel it to be the vital and paramount issue, and must be willing to hazard everything for its success.  He must have the absolute faith and the indomitable will of Luther.  “Here stand I; I can no other.”  How can we expect a President whom this system elects to devote himself to its destruction?  General Grant, elected by a spontaneous patriotic impulse, fresh from the regulated order of military life and new to politics and politicians, saw the reason and the necessity of reform.  The hero of a victorious war, at the height of his popularity, his party in undisputed and seemingly indisputable supremacy, made the attempt.  Congress, good-naturedly tolerating what it considered his whim of inexperience, granted money to try an experiment.  The adverse pressure was tremendous.  “I am used to pressure,” said the soldier.  So he was, but not to this pressure.  He was driven by unknown and incalculable currents.  He was enveloped in whirlwinds of sophistry, scorn, and incredulity.  He who upon his own line had fought it out all summer to victory, upon a line absolutely new and unknown was naturally bewildered and dismayed.  So Wellington had drawn the lines of victory on the Spanish Peninsula and had saved Europe at Waterloo.  But even Wellington at Waterloo could not be also Sir Robert Peel at Westminster.  Even Wellington, who had overthrown Napoleon in the field, could not also be the parliamentary hero who for the welfare of his country would dare to risk the overthrow of his party.

When at last President Grant said, “If Congress adjourns without positive legislation on Civil Service reform, I shall regard such action as a disapproval of the system and shall abandon it,” it was, indeed, a surrender, but it was the surrender of a champion who had honestly mistaken both the nature and the strength of the adversary and his own power of endurance.