One of the worst features of the old spoils system was the ruthless cruelty and brutality it so often bred in the treatment of faithful public servants without political influence.  Life is hard enough and cruel enough at best, and this is as true of public service as of private service.  Under no system will it be possible to do away with all favoritism and brutality and meanness and malice.  But at least we can try to minimize the exhibition of these qualities.  I once came across a case in Washington which very keenly excited my sympathy.  Under an Administration prior to the one with which I was connected a lady had been ousted from a Government position.  She came to me to see if she could be reinstated. (This was not possible, but by active work I did get her put back in a somewhat lower position, and this only by an appeal to the sympathy of a certain official.) She was so pallid and so careworn that she excited my sympathy and I made inquiries about her.  She was a poor woman with two children, a widow.  She and her two children were in actual want.  She could barely keep the two children decently clad, and she could not give them the food growing children need.  Three years before she had been employed in a bureau in a department of Washington, doing her work faithfully, at a salary of about $800.  It was enough to keep her and her two children in clothing, food, and shelter.  One day the chief of the bureau called her up and told her he was very sorry that he had to dismiss her.  In great distress she asked him why; she thought that she had been doing her work satisfactorily.  He answered her that she had been doing well, and that he wished very much that he could keep her, that he would do so if he possibly could, but that he could not; for a certain Senator, giving his name, a very influential member of the Senate, had demanded her place for a friend of his who had influence.  The woman told the bureau chief that it meant turning her out to starve.  She had been thirteen or fourteen years in the public service; she had lost all touch with her friends in her native State; dismissal meant absolute want for her and her children.  On this the chief, who was a kind man, said he would not have her turned out, and sent her back to her work.

But three weeks afterwards he called her up again and told her he could not say how sorry he was, but the thing had to be done.  The Senator had been around in person to know why the change had not been made, and had told the chief that he would be himself removed if the place were not given him.  The Senator was an extremely influential man.  His wants had to be attended to, and the woman had to go.  And go she did, and turned out she was, to suffer with her children and to starve outright, or to live in semi-starvation, just as might befall.  I do not blame the bureau chief, who hated to do what he did, although he lacked the courage to refuse; I do not even very much blame the Senator, who did not know the hardship that he was causing, and who had been calloused by long training in the spoils system; but this system, a system which permits and encourages such deeds, is a system of brutal iniquity.