the United States who has, as a rule, acted on these principles.  His example was not followed by his early successors, or by any of the more recent occupants of the Presidency.  His successors, elected by a party, have not seen their way to make appointments without regard to party connections.  The Civil Service Reform agitation of the last twenty-five years is nothing but an effort to return, in regard to the humbler national offices, to the practice of President Washington.

In spite of these resemblances between Washington’s time and our own, the profound contrasts make the resemblances seem unimportant.  In the first years of the Government of the United States there was widespread and genuine apprehension lest the executive should develop too much power, and lest the centralization of the Government should become overwhelming.  Nothing can be farther from our political thoughts to-day than this dread of the power of the national executive.  On the contrary, we are constantly finding that it is feeble where we wish it were strong, impotent where we wish it omnipotent.  The Senate of the United States has deprived the President of much of the power intended for his office, and has then found it, on the whole, convenient and desirable to allow itself to be held up by any one of its members who possesses the bodily strength and the assurance to talk or read aloud by the week.  Other forces have developed within the Republic quite outside of the Government, which seem to us to override and almost defy the closely limited governmental forces.  Quite lately we have seen two of these new forces—­one a combination of capitalists, the other a combination of laborers—­put the President of the United States into a position of a mediator between two parties whom he could not control, and with whom he must intercede.  This is part of the tremendous nineteenth century democratic revolution, and of the newly acquired facilities for combination and association for the promotion of common interests.  We no longer dread abuse of the power of state or church; we do dread abuse of the powers of compact bodies of men, highly organized and consenting to be despotically ruled, for the advancement of their selfish interests.

Washington was a stern disciplinarian in war; if he could not shoot deserters he wanted them “stoutly whipped.”  He thought that army officers should be of a different class from their men, and should never put themselves on an equality with their men; he went himself to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and always believed that firm government was essential to freedom.  He never could have imagined for a moment the toleration of disorder and violence which is now exhibited everywhere in our country when a serious strike occurs.  He was the chief actor through the long struggles, military and civil, which attended the birth of this nation, and took the gravest responsibilities which could then fall to the lot of soldiers or statesmen; but he never encountered, and indeed never imagined, the anxieties and dangers which now beset the Republic of which he was the founder.  We face new difficulties.  Shall we face them with Washington’s courage, wisdom, and success?