Assassination and the Spoils System [pp. 145-170]

ASSASSINATION AND THE SPOILS SYSTEM.
prospects of republican institutions will fill broad spaces together in periodical literature of every European state. Neither
friends nor enemies of these institutions will be allowed to
remain ignorant that the assassination for political reasons has
a place in the great republic as well as in the great monarchies.
It is not without reason that the assassin shot of Guiteau
has produced a far more profound sense of peril than that of
Lawrence or of Booth. For, when Lawrence fired, there was
no appreciation of the savage system which Jackson had just
established, and the National Bank was writhing in the agonies
of death. When Lincoln was murdered, slavery had perished;
the shot of Booth being the very last ever fired in its name.
But the spoils system which made an assassin of Guiteau is a
living force, potential in councils of great parties, believed by
many to be an essential agency in our politics which only doctrinaires and enthusiasts would attempt to overthrow.
Poor, indeed, would be their prospect, if at such a time the
American people had shown themselves incapable of a grand,
stern resolve for reform; and lamentable, indeed, will it be if
the loss of so mighty a power for good as that resolve shall be
allowed to evaporate in amiable sympathy for the afflicted and
in mere denunciation of the assassin and the spoilsmen.
It is, therefore, the great duty of the hour to make it effective for the overthrow of that malignant destructive system
which has been growing continually during the forty-six years
between the two assassinations which mark its establishment
and its crisis.
Under such a government as ours, it is plain that there can
be no discretion for mere patronage, no right to confer office
as a favor or a bribe, no right to remove without good cause.
The authority of appointment and removal alike should be
exercised as a trust strictly in the interest of the public. To
exercise that authority arbitrarily, or as a mere favor, to help a
party or a friend, is, therefore, as gross a violation of duty and
as plain a prostitution of public functions as it is to use the public money for the same purpose. The difference in detail is
that between the head of a department embezzling the public
funds himself or appointing a subordinate known to be likely
to embezzle it-the difference between causing the people to
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