In the sphere of national politics, where the opportunities were greater, betrayals of public trust were even more flagrant.  One revelation after another showed officers, high and low, possessed with the spirit of peculation.  Members of Congress, it was found, accepted railway stock in exchange for votes in favor of land grants and other concessions to the companies.  In the administration as well as the legislature the disease was rife.  Revenue officers permitted whisky distillers to evade their taxes and received heavy bribes in return.  A probe into the post-office department revealed the malodorous “star route frauds”—­the deliberate overpayment of certain mail carriers whose lines were indicated in the official record by asterisks or stars.  Even cabinet officers did not escape suspicion, for the trail of the serpent led straight to the door of one of them.

In the lower ranges of official life, the spoils system became more virulent as the number of federal employees increased.  The holders of offices and the seekers after them constituted a veritable political army.  They crowded into Republican councils, for the Republicans, being in power, could alone dispense federal favors.  They filled positions in the party ranging from the lowest township committee to the national convention.  They helped to nominate candidates and draft platforms and elbowed to one side the busy citizen, not conversant with party intrigues, who could only give an occasional day to political matters.  Even the Civil Service Act of 1883, wrung from a reluctant Congress two years after the assassination of Garfield, made little change for a long time.  It took away from the spoilsmen a few thousand government positions, but it formed no check on the practice of rewarding party workers from the public treasury.

On viewing this state of affairs, many a distinguished citizen became profoundly discouraged.  James Russell Lowell, for example, thought he saw a steady decline in public morals.  In 1865, hearing of Lee’s surrender, he had exclaimed:  “There is something magnificent in having a country to love!” Ten years later, when asked to write an ode for the centennial at Philadelphia in 1876, he could think only of a biting satire on the nation: 

    “Show your state legislatures; show your Rings;
     And challenge Europe to produce such things
     As high officials sitting half in sight
     To share the plunder and fix things right. 
     If that don’t fetch her, why, you need only
     To show your latest style in martyrs,—­Tweed: 
     She’ll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears
     At such advance in one poor hundred years.”

When his critics condemned him for this “attack upon his native land,” Lowell replied in sadness:  “These fellows have no notion of what love of country means.  It was in my very blood and bones.  If I am not an American who ever was?...  What fills me with doubt and dismay is the degradation of the moral tone.  Is it or is it not a result of democracy?  Is ours a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ or a Kakistocracy [a government of the worst], rather for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”