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