the hands of a crew of jobbers and dingy hunters after petty offices.  England, of course, has had and now has practices theoretically as indefensible, but none possessing any such sinister importance.  It is hard, therefore, for us to conceive how little of really vicious intent was necessary to set this disastrous influence going.  There was no trained Civil Service with its unpartisan traditions.  In the case of offices corresponding to those of our permanent heads of departments it seemed reasonable that the official should, like his chief the Minister concerned, be a person in harmony with the President.  As to the smaller offices—­the thousands of village postmasterships and so forth—­one man was likely to do the work as well as another; the dispossessed official could, in the then condition of the country, easily find another equally lucrative employment; “turn and turn about” seemed to be the rule of fair play.

There were now few genuine issues in politics.  Compromise on vital questions was understood to be the highest statesmanship.  The Constitution itself, with its curious system of checks and balances, rendered it difficult to bring anything to pass.  Added to this was a party system with obvious natural weaknesses, infected from the first with a dangerous malady.  The political life, which lay on the surface of the national life of America, thus began to assume an air of futility, and, it must be added, of squalor.  Only, Englishmen, recollecting the feebleness and corruption which marked their aristocratic government through a great part of the eighteenth century, must not enlarge their phylacteries at the expense of American democracy.  And it is yet more important to remember that the fittest machinery for popular government, the machinery through which the real judgment of the people will prevail, can only by degrees and after many failures be devised.  Popular government was then young, and it is young still.

So much for the great world of politics in those days.  But in or about 1830 a Quaker named Lundy had, as Quakers used to say, “a concern” to walk 125 miles through the snow of a New England winter and speak his mind to William Lloyd Garrison.  Garrison was a poor man who, like Franklin, had raised himself as a working printer, and was now occupied in philanthropy.  Stirred up by Lundy, he succeeded after many painful experiences, in gaol and among mobs, in publishing in Boston on January 1, 1831, the first number of the Liberator.  In it he said:  “I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.  I will be as hard as truth and as uncompromising as justice.  I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard.”  This was the beginning of the new Abolitionist movement.  The Abolitionists, in the main, were impracticable people; Garrison in the end proved otherwise.  Under the existing Constitution, they had nothing