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

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.
chine managers of each party count on from $IOO,oo000 to $225,ooo annually from this quarter. The evidence seems to show,
for example, that, last year, the 735 members of the fire department and the 2450 members of the police department were each
required to pay about three per cent of their salaries to these
managers for each party. Yet these faithful officials, thus plundered by both parties, on the theory that every official must help
his party, are not permitted to be delegates to, or to take part
in, any convention for nominating officers. The prohibition is
just, but justice and decency alike require that the Commissioners over them should observe it instead of being the active partisans they are. The same system which makes these vast levies
to fill its treasury compels, on pain of dismissal, all these public
servants to work for the enforcement of its orders and the election of its candidates. The government thus permits its own
authority to be prostituted, its own servants to be enslaved, and
the money they have earned to be pillaged under pretence of
maintaining great principles and of carrying on government
through parties, when the whole process is destructive of all the
conditions upon which political principles can be maintained or
parties can be either vigorous, honest, or useful. Such assessments are unknown in any other country more civilized than
Mexico and Turkey. They degrade the government itself,
while supplying to partisan chieftains the means which enable
them to defy it. They tell the public servant that his country
is too feeble, too indifferent, or too corrupt to protect him from
pillage. They prompt him to neglect of duty, and to embezzlement as his only means of indemnity. President Grant, before
he allowed a relapse to the spoils system, forbade these assessments. In his message of December, I879, President Hayes
declared that, "If the salaries are but a fair compensation of the
officers, it is gross injustice to levy a tax on them. If they are
made excessive in order that they may bear a tax, the excess is
an indirect robbery of the public funds." In a speech in Congress,
April I9, I872, President Garfield used this language: "I ask
these gentlemen what they think of the system of political assessments,... of issuing a circular calling for one, two, or three per
cent of the salaries of all the employees,... with the distinct
understanding that unless they pay others will be found to fill
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