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precedentedly small. But I shall hardly be contradicted when I say that the party most earnest in its work and most active and enthusiastic in its efforts, was the one which fought without any prospect of a partisan victory and into whose hopes the winning of office or other selfish advantage did not enter in the slightest degree.
I mean the sound money Democrats, for whom the struggle had no victory but the victory of the cause which they believed to be the cause of the national honor and welfare. Truly, the slanderers who asserted that it requires the promise of reward in the shape of official spoil to inspire Americans with an earnest interest in the affairs of their country and to stimulate them to patriotic exertion have never more impressively been put to shame, and their disgraceful pretence ought not to be heard of again. It is a significant fact that those whose zeal in the late campaign was most conspicuously unselfish put forth the most emphatic pronouncement in favor of civil service reform, while the party whose cause was condemned by the verdict of the American people, was the only one which sought to inspirit the efforts of its adherents by opening to them the prospect of unlimited official plunder.
I am, of course, very far from asserting that civil service reform played an important part in the late campaign as a political issue. The popular mind was absorbed with other things. But I do say that spoils politics suffered a double defeat in the election: The party to whose cause and to whose prospects the spoils idea was most foreign proved itself in political action the most enthusiastic and efficient, while the party which invoked the spoils spirit to its aid, found the promise of spoils utterly impotent to avert its discomfiture.
This moral triumph, however, is by no means the only auspicious event upon which we may congratulate ourselves. The hope expressed a year ago that President Cleveland would, as to the extension of the classified service so far as it could be effected by executive action alone, leave to his successors but little to do, has been fully justified. The executive order promulgated by him on May 6th, 1896, marks one of the greatest and most important onward strides in the history of the reform movement. This order added to the classified service and subjected to the merit system at one stroke of the pen more than 40,000 places, so that the number of posi-
