Now, it is easy to kill weeds if we can destroy their roots, and it is not difficult to determine what the principle of reform legislation should be if we can agree upon the source of the abuses to be reformed.  May they not have a common origin?  In fact, are they not all bound together as parts of one system?  The Representative in Congress, for instance, does not ask whether the interests of the public service require this removal or that appointment, but whether, directly or indirectly, either will best serve his own interests.  The Senator acts from the same motives.  The President, in turn, balances between the personal interests of leading politicians—­President, Senators, and Representatives all wishing to pay for personal service and to conciliate personal influence.  So also the party labor required of the place-holder, the task of carrying caucuses, of defeating one man and electing another, as may be ordered, the payment of the assessment levied upon his salary—­all these are the price of the place.  They are the taxes paid by him as conditions of receiving a personal favor.  Thus the abuses have a common source, whatever may be the plea for the system from which they spring.  Whether it be urged that the system is essential to party organization, or that the desire for place is a laudable political ambition, or that the Spoils System is a logical development of our political philosophy, or that new brooms sweep clean, or that any other system is un-American—­whatever the form of the plea for the abuse, the conclusion is always the same, that the minor places in the Civil Service are not public trusts, but rewards and prizes for personal and political favorites.

The root of the complex evil, then, is personal favoritism.  This produces congressional dictation, senatorial usurpation, arbitrary removals, interference in elections, political assessments, and all the consequent corruption, degradation, and danger that experience has disclosed.  The method of reform, therefore, must be a plan of selection for appointment which makes favoritism impossible.  The general feeling undoubtedly is that this can be accomplished by a fixed limited term.  But the terms of most of the offices to which the President and the Senate appoint, and upon which the myriad minor places in the service depend, have been fixed and limited for sixty years, yet it is during that very period that the chief evils of personal patronage have appeared.  The law of 1820, which limited the term of important revenue offices to four years, and which was afterwards extended to other offices, was intended, as John Quincy Adams tells us, to promote the election to the presidency of Mr. Crawford, who was then Secretary of the Treasury.  The law was drawn by Mr. Crawford himself, and it was introduced into the Senate by one of his devoted partisans.  It placed the whole body of executive financial officers at the mercy of the Secretary of the Treasury and of a majority of the Senate, and its design, as Mr.