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Governor, for Mayor, for Judge, and so on. He exacts from them implicit subserviency to his behests. In short, he absorbs in himself well-nigh all the functions of the political party.
I speak here of the boss in his highest development. This is no fancy picture. We have had party bosses, Democrats as well as Republicans, who answered this description in every touch. You may find them in New York and Pennsylvania. In other States the development has not been so complete. It is true, the bosses were sometimes baffled by revolts of public sentiment, and occasionally by a spirited President, who showed them his teeth in repelling their dictatorial demand for the absolute control of the federal patronage, or by some dutiful governor, who had a sense of higher obligation and a will of his own.
But you may safely take it that wherever a party machine exists, mainly held together by what has picturesquely been called "the cohesive power of public plunder", it will, by a natural process, tend to evolve that bossdom I have described—here a little more rapidly, there a little more slowly, as local conditions may be more or less favorable to it.
Wherever it exists, even in comparatively small beginnings, it will tend to grow in extent and rapacity of power; and in the same measure, as it grows, it will tend more and more to bring our public life under the control of the political huckster, to degrade our politics to the level of a game of small intrigues for selfish advantage in various shapes, and to exclude from official position and activity that high-minded ambition which would serve the general good according to the dictates of conscience and the inspirations of an enlightened patriotism—I say it will tend to exclude that high-minded ambition, unless it can corrupt and subjugate it to its selfish ends.
Now I do not assert that the element of patronage and office-spoil is the only agency that has fostered the tendency of demoralizing and degrading selfishness in our political life. But every attentive observer knows that the spoils system has been the principal and most effective agency in furnishing that evil tendency with an organized and well-drilled force of spoils politicians, or mercenaries—a force always standing ready for action in season and out of season, with untiring energy and sleepless perseverance, whenever
