ENCOURAGEMENTS AND WARNINGS.
By Hon. Carl Schurz.
THE year which has elapsed since our last annual meeting has been, in various ways, one of extraordinary prosperity to the cause of civil service reform. The recent election campaign has served to exhibit in a singularly clear light some of the remarkable and beneficial changes which the merit system has wrought in our political life, and to expose in their whole futility many of the fallacies, deceptions and superstitions, which the reform movement has had, and, in some measure, still has to overcome.
There are many among us who remember the time when the heads of our larger custom houses, post offices, navy yards, internal revenue offices, and so on, were looked upon as great party potentates responsible not merely for the business conduct of their respective offices, but for the political conduct of the districts over which they held sway—nay, whose political duties were not seldom regarded as paramount to their strictly official functions. I have frequently heard it said that the collector of customs for the port of New York, was second in political importance only to the President of the United States inasmuch as he had to control the politics of the great Empire State, whose vote was usually decisive in presidential elections. It was owing to the political importance of this office that the country had to witness the grotesque spectacle of a United States Senator resigning his place because his advice was slighted in an appointment to the collectorship. The collector of the port of Boston was regarded
