part of the Constitution, can save them-a doctrine which would soon lead to other and more costly sacrifices, in which our freedom would be lost. We do not so much need strong-willed Presidents as a strongwilled people, who will not allow the prerogatives of the Presidency to be encroached upon and whittled away by partisan expediency. Not strong men, but strong laws strongly exacted and strongly administered by Presidents who carefully avoid legislative and judicial acts, but as carefully resist trespassers of the other departments of the Government on executive responsibility. The thoughtful people of the country, who have sunk into silence and apathy in the presence of an imperative but shallow political partisanship that has long had its way, must learn that they have a power in sustaining, by sympathy and intelligent and outspoken approval through the press and in the magazines and pulpits, and on all public occasions where the voice of a wise man reaches far, the acts of those high officials, the President and the heads of departments, when they seek to return to the traditions of the Government in its best and earliest days, and to put and keep in office only men selected for their competency, character, and worth, without regard to partisan considerations. It was only by the support which a few statesmen of both parties gave each other, and by the support which the small class of the best patriots among the electors gave them, that, by degrees, a policy was established in England that gained steadily until it utterly displaced the spoils system and converted Parliament and party to its views. When the people come to understand, as it is in the power of a plain-speaking class of civil-service reformers to enable them to see, that they are cheated out of the only privilege the spoils system promises-that is, "rotation in office," and an opportunity of freely aspiring to Government employ by the spoils system itself, which confines offices to politicians by trade, a small and vicious class, and locks up patronage in the hands of political Levites; that the vast majority of those who desire office are not only made helpless by their very worth and their inability to stoop to the low door at which aspirants must creep in, while the supposed right to office is converted into the right of the fuglemen of trading politicians to be rewarded for their services at the cost of efficiency and integrity in the public service-then we may hope the people will turn against the spoils system as one that fattens upon their plainest rights. It ought to be an honorable ambition, as honorable as the service of the army or navy, to enter the civil service of the country. The army and navy would sink where the civil service has sunk, if it

followed its method, and the civil service would rise to the level of the army and navy service if it followed the method of appointments deemed necessary in both. In a country needing a hundred thousand office-holders, the vocation ought to be as honorable on social grounds as it is desirable on account of its salaries. How can it be made so except by making entrance to it depend upon merit, and merit only, and that merit to be determined by open competition? Let an examining board of experts have the complete custody of selecting from among all aspirants to office (below the few that must be in the free choice of the President, not above fifty) by rules publicly known and approved, and we should soon have those with a native aptitude for governmental business aspiring to and obtaining these places. The whole disgusting meaning of the word politician as it is now used would lose its offensive tang. The promising youth of the country, born to humble fortunes, would make a governmental career an object of serious ambition and of due preparation. It would not matter how far in the interior and from political centers they lived, nor how little party influence they possessed, if only they had the brains and the training that enabled them to prove their fitness for vacancies in the civil service. They would not be injuring their self-respect and tempting the love of power in others by cringing at the feet of partisans and caucusleaders. They would simply have the honest chance of competing, on the grounds of pure merit, for the places that need competent occupants. What could do so much to elevate politics to its old place as this simple but radical and effective change in substituting open competition for party and personal influence, in all the offices of the State and country below the few highest, which confessedly must be made in accordance with party triumphs expressive of the national preference, and in order to carry out great lines of policy, newly demanded by a national majority?

We have entered into only a few of the questions raised by civilservice reform, being chiefly anxious to win attention to the example of Great Britain. We are well aware that, the better England's example is, the worse a certain portion of the American people will hate it. It is enough to damage the best counsel with some stupid demagogues, to say that it comes from England. But such fools are below argument, and must be left out of account in this discussion. Meanwhile the example of Great Britain is not forced upon us by her own statesmen. It is simply commended by disinterested American students of her system of civil-service administration.

We have said nothing, we can say nothing, that precludes the necessity of reading Mr. Eaton's work by those who would fully understand the strength and importance of the lesson it gives. No book so valuable to the American people has appeared in our day. We should be glad to see a vigorous society organized, and with a hundred skillful lecturers in the field, whose sole business it should be to make the people of the country acquainted with the facts set forth in Mr. Eaton's work. If they were known, they would create an inevitable revolution in our whole political sentiment. They will be known and must be considered, but how soon depends on the zeal of those who have already estimated their value. The civilservice reform is the truest issue before the country. We have had a sham fight over it, but we are preparing for a real battle. It will be in five years the chief issue, and settle, if not the next, then the next but one, Presidential canvass. Meanwhile we must not fail to recognize the genuine interest of the President in civil-service reform. We believe him to be truly in earnest, and doing the best he can. But he has had little support from his Cabinet, and less from Congress. The Secretary of the Interior has perhaps done his best, but he has had a discouraging discountenance from the Senate and from the House. We have had, doubtless under Presidential inspiration, a real civil-service reform going on in the New York Custom-House, and in the New York Post-Office, of a most creditable kind; but it is local, and carried on by the volunteer labor of heads of the departments who ought not to be charged with it, as it imposes new cares upon those who have already enough to do. We want a universal system, a commission supported by the nation and having for its sole duty to inaugurate and carry out the method of open competition for all governmental offices, not excepted for obvious and defensible reasons. What is required is so well expressed in a recent statement of principles set forth by the Independent Republican Association of New York that we adopt it as the condensation of our hopes and wishes:

"The repeal of the acts which limit the terms of office of certain government officials to four years; the repeal of the tenure of office acts which limit the power of the Executive to remove for cause ; the establishment of a permanent civil-service commission, or equivalent measures to ascertain by open competition and certify to the President or other appointing power the fitness of applicants for nomination or appointment to all non-political offices."

HENRY W. BELLOWS.

OUR POLITICAL DANGERS.

Ir a close observer had been asked at any time within the last fifteen years to name the greatest danger to which our national peace and good name were subject-the danger most like to come upon us with bewildering suddenness-he could hardly have failed to reply that it was that of a contested Presidential election. This danger did burst upon us three years ago. We then escaped, through a measure which might have failed had it not been forced upon our legislators by a pressure from the business community which it was difficult to resist. It needs little reading of public sentiment, especially among Democrats, to see that this plan is not likely to be tried again in our time. The experience is too full of suggestions for forming a judgment respecting the probable decision of any tribunal which might be proposed. The plan of 1877 was adopted by both parties because neither party could see clearly what the decision was likely to be. But for this, it is very doubtful whether an agreement could have been reached. If a similar contingency should meet us in the future, and the two parties be called upon, in the very heat of the contest, to agree upon a tribunal to whose decision both should submit, will it be possible to select a body of men whose opinion neither party shall believe that it can fairly divine? For we must remember that it is not necessary that the divination shall be correct; the plan is spoiled if the astute minds of leading politicians are led to any conclusion whatever, true or false.

One conclusion which both sides will draw from the experience of the past is, that those with whom the decision rests must have no political leanings, or if the leanings exist they must be absolutely undiscoverable. The possibility of finding a set of men to fulfill these conditions will hardly be maintained.

All this does not in any way militate against the Electoral Commission of 1877. Few acts of our political history are more honor

able to our people than the fact that they were able to find a practical way out of a difficulty which, as human nature goes, might have been expected to culminate in anarchy or civil war.

Yet another warning of what may happen to us at any moment comes through the recent dispute in Maine. But for the firm and exceptional position taken by the Supreme Court of the State, a dual government would have continued to exist until the coming Presidential election, and the question would have been open whether the electors were certified by a legal State authority. It is vain to say that there can be no doubt judicially respecting the validity of the certificates, because the question will be raised not by a court, but by men feeling that their duty to their party and to their constituents requires them to do all in their power to secure the election of their candidate. Men's ideas of law differ when their interests lie in opposite directions. We need not expect them to agree when there is no judge to which the case can be submitted.

In times when one party or the other was almost sure to have an overwhelming majority, occasional disputed cases in individual States had little significance, and could be safely ignored. But one of the curious political phenomena of the present time is the tendency to a balance between the two parties-a tendency which seems to be rather on the increase. In several States the two parties are so nearly equal that a change of two or three per cent. of the voters from one party to the other will change the political complexion of the State, and every calculation seems to make it probable that the next Presidential election will turn upon the votes of one or two closely contested States, as it did in 1876. The genral subject of the law of elections, national as well as State, thus assumes a gravity never before known in our history.

Under such a state of things, the question how a dispute as to who is the rightful President of the United States shall be avoided or settled can not be considered apart from the general question of providing for cases of contested elections. Besides, it may be laid down as an axiom that no far-reaching question of public policy can be intelligibly considered apart from the national habits and characteristics with which it is associated. Such a question may be expected to assume a different bearing in every different community, and, as the modes of action and thought of the community change, these bearings change with it. We shall, therefore, ask the reader to take a somewhat wider survey of the situation than would be necessary for the mere discussion of a point of law.