the Organization. It was all very well to forego re-election and dispense with their help for the future, but he could not escape from the debt which he owed them for the past.

Edified by Hayes' experience, his successor, Garfield, showed no intention of taking the bestowal of offices out of the hands of members of Congress. But while lending himself to the spoils' system, he provoked, from his very accession, the violent animosity of the famous Roscoe Conkling by the way in which he interpreted the division of the spoils. The conflict which broke out between the President and the Senator, and which offered the public the rich treat of a big political scandal, was chiefly remarkable for the evidence it supplied of the lengths to which the insolent pretensions of the powerful Machine leaders could go. The new President, desirous of ingratiating himself with all the factions of the party in the State of New York, made a few appointments without reference to, or even against the wish of, Roscoe Conkling, who, however, was not forgotten. But Conkling considered the fact of not having taken his advice and obtained his consent for the appointments in question as a breach of faith on the part of the President, and he called on him to mend his ways. On Garfield's refusing, Conkling wanted to play the old game of 1877 by asking the Senate to reject the candidates submitted by the President, but the assembly would not follow him on this occasion. Conkling looked on this as a flagrant violation, at his expense, of the rule of the "courtesy of the Senate," and he appealed from the President and the Senate to his electors. He and his trusty colleague of the State of New York sent in their resignations; they were not re-elected. But in the meanwhile the appetites aroused by the spoils brought about a far more serious collision; among the horde of office-seekers who invaded Washington, expecting more, it would appear, from Garfield than from his predecessor, one, being disappointed or having lost patience, assassinated the President. This tragic death surrounded him with the halo of a martyr for the cause of the emancipation of the public service from the politicians, which he had not had the time or the strength of will to embrace, and won over public opinion to it better than years of political propaganda could have done. The shock given to opinion helped to make Congress pass a law

which withdrew from the favouritism of the administration, or, what came to the same thing, from the exigencies of members of Congress, a certain number of offices by having them filled by competitive examinations. This reform, carried in 1883, was the starting-point of an important movement in the political life of the United States, as will be seen in a subsequent chapter, where the subject will be fully dealt with, but it could not restore the free use of the presidential prerogative in regard to appointments and cancel the encroachments of the CongressMeanwhile, it is enough to point out that the appointments for which the President has to obtain the confirmation of the Senate have not been affected by the new law, the intervention of the Senate in these cases being prescribed by the Constitution.

men.

For the moment the actual effect produced by the awakening of public opinion was to detach enough supporters from the Republican Organization to put an end to the monopoly of power which it had enjoyed for nearly a quarter of a century, and bring into the Presidency, under the Democratic flag, a man of undaunted courage and incorruptible honesty, Mr. Grover Cleveland. But the career of this President even, which shed such a lustre on the independent exercise of the executive power, gave the best. possible proof of how difficult, not to say impossible, it was for the President, in the state of things described above, to curb the Organization of the party. In spite of the purity of his intentions, upheld by an indomitable will, Cleveland was not able, especially during his first Presidency, to free himself either from personal obligations to the Organization, or from the anxiety of maintaining the strength of the party of which the Organization made itself the caretaker, or from the necessities imposed by the constitutional relations between the President and Congress, and exploited by the Organization in its own interest. Cleveland was by no means a mere tool of the spoils' system and rotation; he made several excellent appointments without a thought of party, but he none the less changed the greater part of the federal office-holders, of course putting Democrats into the place of dismissed Republicans. In doing this he showed himself far more scrupulous than his predecessors, but among the appointments made by him there were some scandalous ones

in the literal sense of the word. He made them with reluctance, but still he made them. For instance, in the State of Maryland he appointed to important posts, at the bidding of the Machine, persons taken from among its creatures, some of whom were real criminals, and of the worst kind. The reason was that the head of the Democratic Machine in Maryland, one of the most questionable politicians in the whole Union, was the chairman of the national committee which conducted the presidential campaign on behalf of Cleveland, and he was besides Senator of the State in the Congress of the United States. In this triple capacity he was too strong even for a Cleveland, so much so that the President, replying to the indignant protests of the respectable citizens of Baltimore, told them that he could not help it, for if he refused the candidates of Mr. Gorman, the Senator in question, the latter would revenge himself by getting the Senate to reject his appointments; or, again, he urged them to summon a mass-meeting to protest against the appointments which he had made at the request of the said Senator.1 By a strongly worded circular (of the 14th of July, 1886), Mr. Cleveland revived President Hayes' order forbidding federal office-holders to engage in active party politics, to take part in the management of caucuses and conventions, etc. But this circular remained a dead letter, at least as regards the Democratic office-holders; it simply served as a pretext for turning out a number of officials of Republican origin whom the administration had found in office. Public opinion, more keenly opposed under Cleveland than under his predecessors to the spoils' system, was not sufficiently so to intimidate the Machines and their representatives in Congress. In regard to great economic problems, such as the currency and customs-duties, which directly affected the material well-being of the masses and kept their susceptibilities on the alert, the President made a brave fight of it with the factious Senate, especially during his second term (1893-1897). When it was a question of appointments to offices, this bellicose ardour cooled down, was tempered by mutual concessions. Made on both sides with a bad grace, and, perhaps, laboriously negotiated, they

1 Cf. L. B. Swift, "Civil Service Reform: A Review of Two Administrations." Forum, Vol. XIV, p. 205.

vindicated neither the prerogatives of the President nor the interests of the public service.

The Republican President who filled the Democratic interregnum between Mr. Cleveland's first and second Presidency, Mr. Benjamin Harrison, had no occasion even to try his strength with the Machine. If he ventured to defy anything, it was public opinion, indignant at seeing the President, in violation of his promises as candidate, revert to the worst traditions of the spoils' system. In the space of one year, thirty thousand employees of the postal department were changed, for no other reason than that given by the postmaster of a town to the postmen whom he discharged: "You have done your work well. You are gentlemen, but you know, boys, you are Democrats." The prostitution of public offices to the party and its myrmidons reached its highest pitch by spreading to the cabinet itself, which was put up to auction, as it were; the proprietor of a large dry-goods store in Philadelphia was rewarded with a post in the cabinet for having supplied the committee that conducted the presidential campaign with a considerable sum of money, a great part of which was notoriously employed in purchasing votes. A precedent was created, and similar things occurred under each of the subsequent administrations. Mr. Cleveland's second administration appointed to an embassy in Europe an individual whose sole claim was the payment of $50,000 to the election fund. In face of the outcry caused by this appointment, the extemporized diplomatist sent in his resignation. Four years afterwards, when Mr. McKinley's Cabinet was being formed, the choice which he made for the post of Secretary of War was attributed to a heavy money contribution towards the presidential campaign, which unfortunately could not make up for the flagrant incompetence exhibited by this minister during the war with Spain, and then with the Filipinos, in which the Republic soon got itself entangled.

The general attitude of Mr. McKinley towards the spoils' system was anything but revolutionary. Taught by the experience of his predecessor, Mr. Cleveland, he wished above all things to live in peace with the Senate and his party, and from the very beginning he resigned his power of appointing to offices in favour of the members of Congress as meekly and

as completely as if the practice were formally prescribed by the Constitution. He made it a rule to simply countersign the appointments recommended by the Senators who represented the party, making good ones if the Senators acting for the Machine proposed them, and bad or detestable ones if the selections made by the Senators were bad or detestable. Thanks to this conduct, the President now in office established a unique record; of the three thousand appointments submitted by him to the Senate during the first twenty months of his Presidency, not one was rejected. Thus, in the thirty years which elapsed after the Civil War, the state of things which made members of Congress representing the party Organization the dispensers of federal patronage has become rather confirmed than otherwise.

VI

The federal officers, who in reality held their places from the members of Congress, were of course at their mercy, and in the election campaigns they placed all their influence at their disposal, made themselves their most zealous agents. But soon the Caucus was not satisfied with these personal exertions, with these corvées; it completed the formula of the Ancien Régime in their case and at their expense by turning them into des taillables et corvéables à merci. All the officials were made liable to a direct and proportional tax for the benefit of the Organization. The practice originated before the Civil War. It crept in at first, under Democratic administrations, during the decade 1840-1850, timidly and slowly. The operations attending the levy of this singular tribute were wrapped in secrecy, and the Press of the party thought it its duty to deny them. In the course of the next decade they increased to a great extent, and under Buchanan they were already thoroughly established. But it was left to the Republican Machine, after the war, to bring the contribution, or rather extortion, system to perfection. The Machine did

1 Conservative Essays, Legal and Political, by S. S. Nicholas, Philad., 1863, pp. 501, 502. "Political Assessments," by Dorman B. Eaton (North American Review, September, 1882, p. 206).