, favored by the defects of our
present form of administration, could no longer obscure the vastly
greater question of the public weal. This change in the popular
attitude toward politics would be sufficient of itself to seal the
doom of the spoils system; but if other influences were needed they
would be found in the new relations of the ministry to the legislature
and the people, since a cabinet bound to take the initiative in great
lines of policy and required to give an account of itself to a hostile
minority in Congress would have little time and less stomach for the
nice apportionment of political rewards to partizan deserts. Finally,
should we adopt the principle of a ministry dependent upon the support
of a majority in the Lower House, the possibility of two changes of
administration within a single year would make the spoils system, as
we now have it, unendurable and unworkable. Indeed, it may be
questioned whether a rigid application of the spoils system by the
administration coming into office in March 1889 would not place the
evils of that system in a peculiarly glaring light, when it is
remembered that a very large number of those who would be asked to
make places for party workers unversed in the routine of public office
have exercised their official functions for barely four years, and but
recently acquired the skill so necessary to the efficient transaction
of business.

The attentive reader will have noted that it has been argued, first
that the spoils system is the natural and inevitable outcome of the
rigidity that seems unseparable from our form of administration; and
second, that such a system, in its grossest development, is almost
impossible under a parliamentary government. The latter line of
argument has been taken less for its own sake than for the purpose of
strengthening the conclusions reached by the former; and the writer
would not be understood as insisting that to eliminate the spoils
system we must adopt exactly such a parliamentary form as now exists
among the free peoples of Europe. Any system that should make it easy
to ascertain the popular will, and should insure the prompt and
certain expression of that will in legislation, would accomplish the
object of substituting principles for spoils in our politics. To
suggest a plausible plan for grafting upon our system this far more
democratic scheme of administration would be a stupendous work,
calling for the highest exercise of trained