stay in: he will hold, as the Federal judges do, by a
life-tenure, "during good behavior." This is now substantially the
system of Great Britain, which, in the judgment of Mr. Dorman B. Eaton,
is so much better than our own as to actually reduce the rate of
criminality in that country, and which, he declares, only political
baseness can prevent us from imitating. A change of administration
there, Mr. Eaton adds, only affects a few scores of persons occupying
the highest positions: the great mass of the officials live and die in
their places, indifferent to the fluctuation of parliamentary
majorities or the rise and fall of ministries.

We must ask ourselves does this system accord with American democracy?

A little more than half a century has passed since John Quincy Adams,
unquestionably the best trained and most experienced American
administrator who ever sat in the Presidency, undertook to establish in
the United States almost precisely the same system as that which Great
Britain now has. Admission to the places was not, it is true, by means
of competitive examination, but the feature--the essential feature--of
permanent tenure was present in his plan. Mr. Adams took the government
from Mr. Monroe without considering any change needful: his Cabinet
advisers even included three of those who had been in the Cabinet of his
predecessor, and these he retained to the end, though at least one of
the three, he thought, had ceased to be either friendly or faithful to
him. Retaining the old officers, and reappointing them if their
commissions expired, selecting new ones, in the comparatively rare cases
of death, resignation or ascertained delinquency, upon considerations
chiefly relating to their personal capabilities for the vacant places,
Mr. Adams was patiently and faithfully engaged during the four years of
his Presidency in establishing almost the precise reform of the national
service which has been in recent times so strenuously urged upon us as
the one great need of the nation--the administrative purification which,
if effectually performed, would prove that our system of government was
fit to continue in existence. Mr. Adams's plan did, indeed, seem
excellent. It commanded the respect of honest but busy citizens absorbed
in their private affairs and desirous that the government might be
fixed, once for all, in settled grooves, so that its functions would
proceed like the steady progress of the seasons. It was an att