ff legislation
called for a thorough revision. Our Civil Service was becoming a
system of political prostitution. Roguery and plunder, born of
the multiplied temptations which the war furnished, had stealthily
crept into the management of public affairs, and claimed immunity
from the right of search. What the country needed was not a stricter
enforcement of party discipline, not military methods and the
fostering of sectional hate, but oblivion of the past, and an
earnest, intelligent, and catholic endeavor to grapple with the
questions of practical administration.

But this, in the very nature of the case, was not to be expected.
The men who agreed to stand together in 1856, on a question which
was now out of the way, and had postponed their differences on
current party questions for that purpose, were comparatively unfitted
for the task of civil administration in a time of peace. They had
had no preparatory training, and the engrossing struggle through
which they had passed had, in fact, disqualified them for the work.
While the issues of the war were retreating into the past the
mercenary element of Republicanism had gradually secured the
ascendancy, and completely appropriated the President. The mischiefs
of war had crept into the conduct of civil affairs, and a thorough
schooling of the party in the use of power had familiarized it with
military ideas and habits, and committed it to loose and indefensible
opinions respecting the powers of the General Government. The
management of the Civil Service was an utter mockery of political
decency, while the animosities engendered by the war were nursed
and coddled as the appointed means of uniting the party and covering
up its misdeeds. The demand for reform, as often as made, was
instantly rebuked, and the men who uttered it branded as enemies
of the party and sympathizers with treason. It is needless to go
into details; but such was the drift of general demoralization that
the chief founders and pre-eminent representatives of the party,
Chase, Seward, Sumner and Greeley were obliged to desert it more
than a year before the end of Gen. Grant's first administration,
as the only means of maintaining their honor and self-respect. My
Congressional term expired a little after Grant and Babcock had
inaugurated the San Domingo project, and Sumner had been degraded
from the Chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Affairs to make
room for Simon Cameron. The "irrepress