h the same results. A bill carefully prepared and providing
for gradual and thorough reform has been introduced with an admirable
report in the Senate of the United States. Mr. Pendleton, the Democratic
Senator from Ohio, declares that the Spoils System which has debauched
the Civil Service of fifty millions of people must be destroyed. Mr.
Dawes, the Republican Senator from Massachusetts, summons all good
citizens to unite to suppress this gigantic evil which threatens
the republic. Conspicuous reformers sit in the Cabinet; and in this
sorrowful moment, at least, the national heart and mind and conscience,
stricken and bowed by a calamity whose pathos penetrates every
house-hold in Christendom, cries to these warning words, "Amen! Amen!"
Like the slight sound amid the frozen silence of the Alps that loosens
and brings down the avalanche, the solitary pistol-shot of the 2d of
July has suddenly startled this vast accumulation of public opinion
into conviction, and on every side thunders the rush and roar of its
overwhelming descent, which will sweep away the host of evils bred of
this monstrous abuse.

This is an extraordinary change for twelve years, but it shows the
vigorous political health, the alert common-sense, and the essential
patriotism of the country, which are the earnest of the success of
any wise reform. The war which naturally produced the lassitude and
indifference to the subject which were evident twelve years ago had
made reform, indeed, a vital necessity, but the necessity was not then
perceived. The dangers that attend a vast system of administration based
to its least detail upon personal patronage were not first exposed by
Mr. Jenckes in 1867, but before that time they had been mainly discussed
as possibilities and inferences. Yet the history of the old New York
council of appointment had illustrated in that State the party fury and
corruption which patronage necessarily breeds, and Governor McKean in
Pennsylvania, at the close of the last century, had made "a clean sweep"
of the places within his power. The spoils spirit struggled desperately
to obtain possession of the national administration from the day of
Jefferson's inauguration to that of Jackson's, when it succeeded.
Its first great but undesigned triumph was the decision of the First
Congress in 1789, vesting the sole power of removal in the President,
a decision which placed almost every position in the Civil Service
unconditionally at his