est serve his own interests. The Senator acts
from the same motives. The President, in turn, balances between the
personal interests of leading politicians--President, Senators,
and Representatives all wishing to pay for personal service and to
conciliate personal influence. So also the party labor required of the
place-holder, the task of carrying caucuses, of defeating one man and
electing another, as may be ordered, the payment of the assessment
levied upon his salary--all these are the price of the place. They are
the taxes paid by him as conditions of receiving a personal favor. Thus
the abuses have a common source, whatever may be the plea for the system
from which they spring. Whether it be urged that the system is essential
to party organization, or that the desire for place is a laudable
political ambition, or that the Spoils System is a logical development
of our political philosophy, or that new brooms sweep clean, or that
any other system is un-American--whatever the form of the plea for the
abuse, the conclusion is always the same, that the minor places in the
Civil Service are not public trusts, but rewards and prizes for personal
and political favorites.

The root of the complex evil, then, is personal favoritism. This
produces congressional dictation, senatorial usurpation, arbitrary
removals, interference in elections, political assessments, and all
the consequent corruption, degradation, and danger that experience has
disclosed. The method of reform, therefore, must be a plan of selection
for appointment which makes favoritism impossible. The general feeling
undoubtedly is that this can be accomplished by a fixed limited term.
But the terms of most of the offices to which the President and the
Senate appoint, and upon which the myriad minor places in the service
depend, have been fixed and limited for sixty years, yet it is during
that very period that the chief evils of personal patronage have
appeared. The law of 1820, which limited the term of important revenue
offices to four years, and which was afterwards extended to other
offices, was intended, as John Quincy Adams tells us, to promote the
election to the presidency of Mr. Crawford, who was then Secretary of
the Treasury. The law was drawn by Mr. Crawford himself, and it was
introduced into the Senate by one of his devoted partisans. It placed
the whole body of executive financial officers at the mercy of the
Secretary of the Treasury and of a m