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

THE PRTIE CE~ T? O REVIEW.
their places are arbitrarily filled under the spoils system, for
mere personal and partisan, if not for corrupt reasons.
It should be added that, for much the same reasons as apply to
the President himself, his constitutional advisers, who by law
have large powers and discretion for enforcing executive policy
and the principles of a party, need to have confidence therein,
and hence their political opinions are also material. They cannot properly advise the President as to principles and policy
which they distrust. In further explanation, it should be said that
it may not be practically to draw near the top of the official sphere
any line below which every officer has the duty of obeying, utterly
without discretion involving principles. For this reason there may
in practice be found a need of insisting on opinions as a qualification on the part of a few other officers; as in the case, for
example, of foreign ministers sent to carry out a particular
policy, district-attorneys and Governors of Territories, possibly
of some others. The most fit and convenient line of division,
between those who govern and those who obey-whose opinions
therefore are or are not material-can easily be regulated by
experience in our affairs, as it has been in the affairs of every
well administered state of Europe. The principle by which
that line will be determined will stand in wide contrast with the
spoils-system theory of favoritism and partisan proscription
which enforces a political test for the selection and removal not
only of every collector, postmaster, and lighthouse-keeper, but
of every letter-carrier, clerk, cartman, washerwoman, office-boy,
in the public service; plain tho it may be to every candid mind,
that their political opinions have no more to do with their duties
than have their views about evolution or the length of the
tail of the last comet.
Thus in the theory of the Constitution as it was carried into
effect by its framers, a broad and elevated field of action is open
to political parties, allowing them to be supreme over the vital,
moulding forces of the country, alike in the sphere Of law and
of administration. It is the true function of parties to embody,
sustain, and make effective, in laws and in executive action, the
great ideal forces of a nation. They can claim no right to coerce
public opinion, and all party action in excess of what is required
to give fair and free expression to the views of the citizen is
pernicious and should be suppressed. The Constitution is
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