ROOT OF THE SPOILS SYSTEM.

What is known as the spoils system of politics, in a measure common to
all times and all forms of government, seems to have reached its
highest development in our Republic. This fact justifies the suspicion
that something in our form of administration is favorable to such
development; and whether we regard the spoils system as praiseworthy
or reprehensible, it will be instructive to inquire why it has
prevailed in this country as among no other free people.

Most persons who deplore the spoils system urge as one of its greatest
evils that it substitutes for the discussion of principles a mere
scramble for office; that it teaches men to value the material prizes
incident to government above political truth. Such reasoners have
strangely mistaken cause for effect. The rarity of ideas in our
political discussions is not an effect, but the immediate cause of the
spoils system; and behind both, as the direct cause of the latter and
the remote cause of the former, lies the difficulty of expressing the
popular will in legislative enactment. In other words, we have
substituted the pursuit of place for the discussion of principles,
because the relations of the people to the law-making body are not
sufficiently close.

No reader of this periodical needs to be reminded that when our
present constitution was written the mass of freemen had not, as now,
come to believe that a constitutional government should include a
legislature promptly obedient to the popular will; a ministry
dependent upon the support of a majority in the popular branch of the
law-making body; and an executive powerless to interfere in
legislation. It was natural, then, that our forefathers, imperfectly
acquainted with this modern device of free peoples, should have
believed that they had secured the prompt and certain efficacy of the
popular will in government by placing no restriction as to national
elections upon the wide suffrage already prevailing in most of the
States, and providing that the chief magistrate and both branches of
the national legislature should be elective and chosen for short
terms. They could not foresee that in course of time a constitutional
monarch would come to have less power than the executive head of the
Republic; that an hereditary House of Lords less often than an
elective Senate would dare to cross the will of the popular
legislative body; that the popular branch of the legislature in a
constitu