tutional opposition. It is thought that to be heroic is to be radical, and that when victory is won in a political battle nothing, least of all the protests of the minority, ought to arrest the self-will of the victors. There is a vigor and ruthlessness which is totally out of place in politics. When it has been established that the power or the legal right to do a thing exists, it is considered pusillanimous to have scruples about exercising the power. Such notions are hostile to any true conceptions of party or party rule, and they lead to those victories to win which parties destroy institutions.
Now when parties have definite principles, this conception leads to sweeping and tyrannical attempts to realize their theories in fact. When they have few or no principles, their contests degenerate into struggles for power and place, and victory means that we or you shall take the offices. Wm. L. Marcy was by no means one of the bad men who have been prominent in American politics, and the education which could make such a man enunciate the bold doctrine that "to the victors belong the spoils" in the unblushing way in which he uttered it is worth studying. Men of decent character and good education do not invent such doctrines and spring them on sedate deliberative bodies on the spur of the moment, and the notion that Marcy invented the spoils doctrine or that Jackson, out of his own evil determination, set out to demoralize the civil service, is both historically false and philosophically absurd. These twin abuses were the culmination of a long history. When Marcy said, "To the victors belong the spoils," he only gave new, distinct, and dogmatic expression to the theories in which he had been educated, and the context of his speech shows that he was not conscious of uttering anything which ought to shock any one of
