Sixth. On the much-vexed and long-mooted question of a bi-metallic or mono-metallic standard my own views are sufficiently indicated in the remarks I have made. I believe the struggle now going on in this country and in other countries for a single gold standard would, if successful, produce wide-spread disaster in the end throughout the commercial world. The destruction of silver as money and establishing gold as the sole unit of value must have a ruinous effect on all forms of property except those investments which yield a fixed return in money. These would be enormously enhanced in value, and would gain a disproportionate and unfair advantage over every other species of property. If, as the most reliable statistics affirm, there are nearly seven thousand millions of coin or bullion in the world, not very unequally divided between gold and silver, it is impossible to strike silver out of existence as money without results which will prove distressing to millions and utterly disastrous to tens of thousands. Alexander Hamilton, in his able and invaluable report in 1791 on the establishment of a mint, declared that "to annul the use of either gold or silver as money is to abridge the quantity of circulating medium, and is liable to all the objections which arise from a comparison of the benefits of a full circulation with the evils of a scanty circulation." I take no risk in saying that the benefits of a full circulation and the evils of a scanty circulation are both immeasurably greater to-day than they were when Mr. Hamilton uttered these weighty words, always provided that the circulation is one of actual money, and not of depreciated promises to pay.

In the report from which I have already quoted, Mr. Hamilton argues at length in favor of a double standard, and all the subsequent experience of well-nigh ninety years has brought out no clearer statement of the whole case nor developed a more complete comprehension of this subtle and difficult subject. "On the whole," says Mr. Hamilton, "it seems most advisable not to attach the unit exclusively to either of the metals, because this cannot be done effectually without destroying the office and character of one of them as money and reducing it to the situation of mere merchandise." And then Mr. Hamilton wisely concludes that this reduction of either of the metals to mere merchandise (I again quote his exact words) "would probably be a greater evil than occasional variations in the unit from the fluctuations in the relative value of the metals, especially if care be taken to regulate the proportion between them with an eye to their average commercial value." I do not think that this country, holding so vast a proportion of the world's supply of silver in its mountains and its mines, can afford to reduce the metal to the "situation of mere merchandise." If silver ceases to be used as money in Europe and America, the great mines of the Pacific slope will be closed and dead. Mining enterprises of the gigantic scale existing in this country cannot be carried on to provide backs for looking-glasses and to manufacture cream-pitchers and sugar-bowls. A vast source of wealth to this entire country is destroyed the moment silver is permanently disused as money. It is for us to check that tendency and bring the continent of Europe back to the full recognition of the value of the metal as a medium of exchange.

Seventh. The question of beginning anew the coinage of silver dollars has aroused much discussion as to its effect on the public credit; and the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Matthews) placed this phase of the subject in the very forefront of the debate—insisting, prematurely and illogically, I think, on a sort of judicial construction in advance, by concurrent resolution, of a certain law in case that law should happen to be passed by Congress. My own view on this question can be stated very briefly. I believe the public creditor can afford to be paid in any silver dollar that the United States can afford to coin and circulate. We have forty thousand millions of property in this country, and a wise self-interest will not permit us to overturn its relations by seeking for an inferior dollar wherewith to settle the dues and demands of any creditor. The question might be different from a merely selfish stand-point if, on paying the dollar to the public creditor, it would disappear after performing that function. But the trouble is that the inferior dollar you pay the public creditor remains in circulation, to the exclusion of the better dollar. That which you pay at home will stay there; that which you send abroad will come back. The interest of the public creditor is indissolubly bound up with the interest of the whole people. Whatever affects him affects us all; and the evil that we might inflict upon him by paying an inferior dollar would recoil upon us with a vengeance as manifold as the aggregate wealth of the Republic transcends the comparatively small limits of our bonded debt. And remember that our aggregate wealth is always increasing, and our bonded debt steadily growing less! If paid in a good silver dollar, the bondholder has nothing to complain of. If paid in an inferior silver dollar, he has the same grievance that will be uttered still more plaintively by the holder of the legal-tender note and of the national-bank bill, by the pensioner, by the day-laborer, and by the countless host of the poor, whom we have with us always, and on whom the most distressing effect of inferior money will be ultimately precipitated.

But I must say, Mr. President, that the specific demand for the payment of our bonds in gold coin and in nothing else, comes with an ill grace from certain quarters. European criticism is levelled against us and hard names are hurled at us across the ocean, for simply daring to state that the letter of our law declares the bonds to be payable in standard coin of July 14, 1870; expressly and explicitly declared so, and declared so in the interest of the public creditor, and the declaration inserted in the very body of the eight hundred million of bonds that have been issued since that date. Beyond all doubt the silver dollar was included in the standard coins of that public act. Payment at that time would have been as acceptable and as undisputed in silver as in gold dollars, for both were equally valuable in the European as well as in the American market. Seven-eighths of all our bonds, owned out of the country, are held in Germany and in Holland, and Germany has demonetized silver and Holland has been forced thereby to suspend its coinage, since the subjects of both powers purchased our securities. The German Empire, the very year after we made our specific declaration for paying our bonds in coin, passed a law destroying so far as lay in their power the value of silver as money. I do not say that it was specially aimed at this country, but it was passed regardless of its effect upon us, and was followed, according to public and undenied statement, by a large investment on the part of the German Government in our bonds, with a view, it was understood, of holding them as a coin reserve for drawing gold from us to aid in establishing their gold standard at home. Thus, by one move the German Government destroyed, so far as lay in its power, the then existing value of silver as money, enhanced consequently the value of gold, and then got into position to draw gold from us at the moment of their need, which would also be the moment of our own sorest distress. I do not say that the German Government in these successive steps did a single thing which it had not a perfect right to do, but I do say that the subjects of that Empire have no right to complain of our Government for the initial step which has impaired the value of one of our standard coins. And the German Government by joining with us in the remonetization of silver, can place that standard coin in its old position and make it as easy for this Government to pay and as profitable for their subjects to receive the one metal as the other.

* * * * *

The effect of paying the labor of this country in silver coin of full value, as compared with the irredeemable paper or as compared even with silver of inferior value, will make itself felt in a single generation to the extent of tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, in the aggregate savings which represent consolidated capital. It is the instinct of man from the savage to the scholar—developed in childhood and remaining with age—to value the metals which in all tongues are called precious. Excessive paper money leads to extravagance, to waste, and to want, as we painfully witness on all sides to-day. And in the midst of the proof of its demoralizing and destructive effect, we hear it proclaimed in the Halls of Congress that "the people demand cheap money." I deny it. I declare such a phrase to be a total misapprehension, a total misinterpretation of the popular wish. The people do not demand cheap money. They demand an abundance of good money, which is an entirely different thing. They do not want a single gold standard that will exclude silver and benefit those already rich. They do not want an inferior silver standard that will drive out gold and not help those already poor. They want both metals, in full value, in equal honor, in what-ever abundance the bountiful earth will yield them to the searching eye of science and to the hard hand of labor.

The two metals have existed side by side in harmonious, honorable companionship as money, ever since intelligent trade was known among men. It is well-nigh forty centuries since "Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth—four hundred shekels of silver—current money with the merchant." Since that time nations have risen and fallen, races have disappeared, dialects and languages have been forgotten, arts have been lost, treasures have perished, continents have been discovered, islands have been sunk in the sea, and through all these ages and through all these changes, silver and gold have reigned supreme, as the representatives of value, as the media of exchange. The dethronement of each has been attempted in turn, and sometimes the dethronement of both; but always in vain. And we are here to-day, deliberating anew over the problem which comes down to us from Abraham's time: the weight of the silver that shall be "current money with the merchant."



JOHN SHERMAN,

OF OHIO. (BORN 1823.)

ON SILVER COINAGE AND TREASURY NOTES;

UNITED STATES SENATE, JUNE 5, 1890.

I approach the discussion of this bill and the kindred bills and amendments pending in the two Houses with unaffected diffidence. No problem is submitted to us of equal importance and difficulty. Our action will affect the value of all the property of the people of the United States, and the wages of labor of every kind, and our trade and commerce with all the world. In the consideration of such a question we should not be controlled by previous opinions or bound by local interests, but with the lights of experience and full knowledge of all the complicated facts involved, give to the subject the best judgment which imperfect human nature allows. With the wide diversity of opinion that prevails, each of us must make concessions in order to secure such a measure as will accomplish the objects sought for without impairing the public credit or the general interests of our people. This is no time for visionary theories of political economy. We must deal with facts as we find them and not as we wish them. We must aim at results based upon practical experience, for what has been probably will be. The best prophet of the future is the past.

To know what measures ought to be adopted we should have a clear conception of what we wish to accomplish. I believe a majority of the Senate desire, first, to provide an increase of money to meet the increasing wants of our rapidly growing country and population, and to supply the reduction in our circulation caused by the retiring of national-bank notes; second, to increase the market value of silver not only in the United States but in the world, in the belief that this is essential to the success of any measure proposed, and in the hope that our efforts will advance silver to its legal ratio with gold, and induce the great commercial nations to join with us in maintaining the legal parity of the two metals, or in agreeing with us in a new ratio of their relative value; and third, to secure a genuine bimetallic standard, one that will not demonetize gold or cause it to be hoarded or exported, but that will establish both gold and silver as standards of value not only in the United States, but among all the civilized nations of the world.

Believing that these are the chief objects aimed at by us all, and that we differ only as to the best means to obtain them, I will discuss the pending propositions to test how far they tend, in my opinion, to promote or defeat these obtects.

And, first, as to the amount of currency necessary to meet the wants of the people.

* * * * *

It is a fact that there has been a constant increase of currency. It is a fact which must be constantly borne in mind. If any evils now exist such as have been so often stated, such as falling prices, increased mortgages, contentions between capital and labor, decreasing value of silver, increased relative value of gold, they must be attributed to some other cause than our insufficient supply of circulation, for not only has the circulation increased in these twelve years 80 per cent., while our population has only increased 36 per cent., but it has all been maintained at the gold standard, which, it is plain, has been greatly advanced in purchasing power. If the value of money is tested by its amount, by numerals, according to the favorite theory of the Senator from Nevada (Mr. Jones), then surely we ought to be on the high road of prosperity, for these numerals have increased in twelve years from $805,000,-000 to $1,405,000,000 in October last, and to $1,420,000,000 on the 1st of this month. This single fact disposes of the claim that insufficient currency is the cause of the woes, real and imaginary, that have been depicted, and compel us to look to other causes for the evils complained of.

I admit that prices for agricultural productions have been abnormally low, and that the farmers of the United States have suffered greatly from this cause. But this depression of prices is easily accounted for by the greatly increased amount of agricultural production, the wonderful development of agricultural implements, the opening of vast regions of new and fertile fields in the West, the reduced cost of transportation, the doubling of the miles of railroads, and the quadrupling capacity of railroads and steamboats for transportation, and the new-fangled forms of trusts and combinations which monopolize nearly all the productions of the farms and workshops of our country, reducing the price to the producer and in some cases increasing the cost to the consumer. All these causes cooperate to reduce prices of farm products. No one of them can be traced to an insufficient currency, now larger in amount in proportion to population than ever before in our history.

But to these causes of a domestic character must be added others, over which we have no control. The same wonderful development of industry has been going on in other parts of the globe. In Russia, especially in Southern Russia, vast regions have been opened to the commerce of the world. Railroads have been built, mines have been opened, exhaustless supplies of petroleum have been found, and all these are competitors with us in supplying the wants of Europe for food, metals, heat, and light. India, with its teeming millions of poorly paid laborers, is competing with our farmers, and their products are transported to market over thousands of miles of railroads constructed by English capital, or by swift steamers through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, reaching directly the people of Europe whom we formerly supplied with food. No wonder, then, that our agriculture is depressed by low prices, caused by competition with new rivals and agencies.

Any one who can overlook these causes and attribute low prices to a want of domestic currency, that has increased and is increasing continually, must be blind to the great forces that in recent times throughout the world are tending by improved methods and modern inventions to lessen the prices of all commodities.

These fluctuations depend upon the law of supply and demand, involving facts too numerous to state, but rarely depending on the volume of money in circulation. An increase of currency can have no effect to advance prices unless we cheapen and degrade it by making it less valuable; and if that is the intention now, the direct and honest way is to put fewer grains of gold or silver in our dollar. This was the old way, by clipping the coin, adding base metal.

If we want a cheaper dollar we have the clear constitutional right to put in it 15 grains of gold instead of 23, or 300 grains of silver instead of 412 1/2, but you have no power to say how many bushels of wheat the new dollar shall buy. You can, if you choose, cheapen the dollar under your power to coin money, and thus enable a debtor to pay his debts with fewer grains of silver or gold, under the pretext that gold or silver has risen in value, but in this way you would destroy all forms of credit and make it impossible for nations or individuals to borrow money for a period of time. It is a species of repudiation.

The best standard of value is one that measures for the longest period its equivalent in other products. Its relative value may vary from time to time. If it falls, the creditor loses; if it increases, the debtor loses; and these changes are the chances of all trade and commerce and all loaning and borrowing. The duty of the Government is performed when it coins money and provides convenient credit representatives of coin. The purchasing power of money for other commodities depends upon changing conditions over which the Government has no control. Even its power to issue paper money has been denied until recently, but this may be considered as settled by the recent decisions of the Supreme Court in the legal-tender cases. All that Congress ought to do is to provide a sufficient amount of money, either of coin or its equivalent of paper money, to meet the current wants of business. This it has done in the twelve years last passed at a ratio of increase far in excess of any in our previous history.

* * * * *

Under the law of February, 1878, the purchase of $2,000,000 worth of silver bullion a month has by coinage produced annually an average of nearly $3,000,000 a month for a period of twelve years, but this amount, in view of the retirement of the bank notes, will not increase our currency in proportion to our increase in population. If our present currency is estimated at $1,400,000,000, and our population is increasing at the ratio of 3 per cent. per annum, it would require $42,000,000 increased circulation each year to keep pace with the increase of population; but as the increase of population is accompanied by a still greater ratio of increase of wealth and business, it was thought that an immediate increase of circulation might be obtained by larger pur chases of silver bullion to an amount sufficient to make good the retirement of bank notes, and keep pace with the growth of population. Assuming that $54,000,000 a year of additional circulation is needed upon this basis, that amount is provided for in this bill by the issue of Treasury notes in exchange for bullion at the market price. I see no objection to this proposition, but believe that Treasury notes based upon silver bullion purchased in this way will be as safe a foundation for paper money as can be conceived.

Experience shows that silver coin will not circulate to any considerable amount. Only about one silver dollar to each inhabitant is maintained in circulation with all the efforts made by the Treasury Department, but silver certificates, the representatives of this coin, pass current without question, and are maintained at par in gold by being received by the Government for all purposes and redeemed if called for. I do not fear to give to these notes every sanction and value that the United States can confer. I do not object to their being made a legal tender for all debts, public or private. I believe that if they are to be issued they ought to be issued as money, with all the sanction and authority that the Government can possibly confer. While I believe the amount to be issued is greater than is necessary, yet in view of the retirement of bank notes I yielded my objections to the increase beyond $4,000,000. As an expedient to provide increased circulation it is far preferable to free coinage of silver or any proposition that has been made to provide some other security than United States bonds for bank circulation. I believe it will accomplish the first object proposed, a gradual and steady increase of the current money of the country.

* * * * *

What then can we do to arrest the fall of silver and to advance its market value? I know of but two expedients. One is to purchase bullion in large quantities as the basis and security of Treasury notes, as proposed by this bill. The other is to adopt the single standard of silver, and take the chances for its rise or fall in the markets of the world. I have already stated the probable results of the hoarding of bullion. By purchasing in the open market our domestic production of silver and hoarding it in the Treasury we withdraw so much from the supply of the world, and thus maintain or increase the price of the remaining silver production of the world. It is not idle in our vaults, but is represented by certificates in active circulation. Sixteen ounces of silver bullion may not be worth one ounce of gold, still one dollar's worth of silver bullion is worth one dollar of gold.

What will be the effect of the free coinage of silver? It is said that it will at once advance silver to par with gold at the ratio of 16 to 1. I deny it. The attempt will bring us to the single standard of the cheaper metal. When we advertise that we will buy all the silver of the world at that ratio and pay in Treasury notes, our notes will have the precise value of 371 1/2 grains of pure silver, but the silver will have no higher value in the markets of the world. If, now, that amount of silver can be purchased at 80 cents, then gold will be worth $1.25 in the new standard. All labor, property, and commodities will advance in nominal value, but their purchasing power in other commodities will not increase. If you make the yard 30 inches long instead of 36 you must purchase more yards for a coat or a dress, but do not lessen the cost of the coat or the dress. You may by free coinage, by a species of confiscation, reduce the burden of a debt, but you cannot change the relative value of gold or silver, or any object of human desire. The only result is to demonetize gold and to cause it to be hoarded or exported. The cheaper metal fills the channels of circulation and the dearer metal commands a premium.

If experience is needed to prove so plain an axiom we have it in our own history. At the beginning of our National Government we fixed the value of gold and silver as 1 to 15. Gold was undervalued and fled the country to where an ounce of gold was worth 151 ounces of silver. Congress, in 1834, endeavored to rectify this by making the ratio 1 to 16, but by this silver was undervalued. Sixteen ounces of silver were worth more than 1 ounce of gold, and silver disappeared. Congress, in 1853, adopted another expedient to secure the value of both metals as money. By this expedient gold is the standard and silver the subsidiary coin, containing confessedly silver of less value in the market than the gold coin, but maintained at the parity of gold coin by the Government.

* * * * *

But it is said that those of us who demand the gold standard, or paper money always equal to gold, are the representatives of capital, money-changers, bondholders, Shylocks, who want to grind and oppress the people. This kind of argument I hoped would never find its way into the Senate Chamber. It is the cry of the demagogue, without the slightest foundation. All these classes can take care of themselves. They are the men who make their profits out of the depreciation of money. They can mark up the price of their property to meet changing standards. They can protect themselves by gold contracts. In proportion to their wealth they have less money on hand than any other class. They have already protected themselves to a great extent by converting the great body of the securities in which they deal into gold bonds, and they hold the gold of the country, which you cannot change in value. They are not, as a rule, the creditors of the country.

The great creditors are savings-banks, insurance companies, widows and orphans, and provident farmers, and business men on a small scale. The great operators are the great borrowers and owe more than is due them. Their credit is their capital and they need not have even money enough to pay their rent.

But how will this change affect the great mass of our fellow-citizens who depend upon their daily labor? A dollar to them means so much food, clothing, and rent. If you cheapen the dollar it will buy less of these. You may say they will get more dollars for their labor, but all experience shows that labor and land are the last to feel the change in monetary standards, and the same resistance will be made to an advance of wages on the silver standard as on the gold standard, and when the advance is won it will be found that the purchasing power of the new dollar is less than the old. No principle of political economy is better established than that the producing classes are the first to suffer and the last to gain by monetary changes.

I might apply this argument to the farmer, the merchant, the professional man, and to all classes except the speculator or the debtor who wishes to lessen the burden of his obligations; but it is not necessary.

It is sometimes said that all this is a false alarm, that our demand for silver will absorb all that will be offered and bring it to par with gold at the old ratio. I have no faith in such a miracle. If they really thought so, many would lose their interest in the question. What they want is a cheaper dollar that would pay debts easier. Others do not want either silver or gold, but want numbers, numerals, the fruit of the printing-press, to be fixed every year by Congress as we do an appropriation bill.

Now, sir, I am willing to do all I can with safety even to taking great risks to increase the value of silver to gold at the old ratio, and to supply paper substitutes for both for circulation, but there is one immutable, unchangeable, ever-existing condition, that the paper substitute must always have the same purchasing power as gold and silver coin, maintained at their legal ratio with each other. I feel a conviction, as strong as the human mind can have, that the free coinage of silver now by the United States will be a grave mistake and a misfortune to all classes and conditions of our fellow-citizens. I also have a hope and belief, but far from a certainty, that the measure proposed for the purchase of silver bullion to a limited amount, and the issue of Treasury notes for it, will bring silver and gold to the old ratio, and will lead to an agreement with other commercial nations to maintain the free coinage of both metals.

And now, sir, I want to state in conclusion, without any purpose to bind myself to detail, that I will vote for any measure that will, in my judgment, secure a genuine bimetallic standard—one that will not demonetize gold or cause it to be hoarded or exported, but will establish both silver and gold as common standards and maintain them at a fixed ratio, not only in the United States but among all the nations of the world. The principles adopted by the Acts of 1853 and 1875 have been sustained by experience and should be adhered to. In pursuance of them I would receive into the Treasury of the United States all the gold and silver produced in our country at their market value, not at a speculative or forced value, but at their value in the markets of the world. And for the convenience of our people I would represent them by Treasury notes to an amount not exceeding their cost. I would confer upon these notes all the use, qualities, and attributes that we can confer within our constitutional power, and support and maintain them as money by coining the silver and gold as needed upon the present legal ratios, and by a pledge of all the revenues of the Government and all the wealth and credit of the United States.

And I would proclaim to all our readiness, by international negotiations or treaties, to bring about an agreement among nations for common units of value and of weights and measures for all the productions of the world.

This hope of philosophers and statesmen is now nearer realization than ever before. If we could contribute to this result it would tend to promote commerce and intercourse, trade and travel, peace and harmony among nations. It would be in line with the civilization of our age. It is by such measures statesmen may keep pace with the marvellous inventions, improvements, and discoveries which have quadrupled the capacity of man for production, made lightning subservient to his will, revealed to him new agencies of power hidden in the earth, and opened up to his enterprise all the dark places of the world. The people of the United States boast that they have done their full share in all this development; that they have grown in population, wealth, and strength; that they are the richest of nations, with untarnished credit, a model and example of self-government without kings or princes or lords. Surely this is no time for a radical change of public policy which seems to have no motive except to reduce the burden of obligations freely taken, a change likely to impair our public credit and produce disorder and confusion in all monetary transactions. Others may see reasons for this change, but I prefer to stand by the standards of value that come to us with the approval and sanction of every party that has administered the Government since its beginning.



JOHN P. JONES,

OF NEVADA. (BORN 1830.)

ON TREASURY NOTES AND SILVER,

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, MAY 12, 1890.

MR. PRESIDENT, the question now about to be discussed by this body is in my judgment the most important that has attracted the attention of Congress or the country since the formation of the Constitution. It affects every interest, great and small, from the slightest concern of the individual to the largest and most comprehensive interest of the nation.

The measure under consideration was reported by me from the Committee on Finance. It is hardly necessary for me to say, however, that it does not fully reflect my individual views regarding the relation which silver should bear to the monetary circulation of the country or of the world. I am, at all times and in all places, a firm and unwavering advocate of the free and unlimited coinage of silver, not merely for the reason that silver is as ancient and honorable a money metal as gold, and equally well adapted for the money use, but for the further reason that, looking at the annual yield from the mines, the entire supply that can come to the mints will at no time be more than is needed to maintain at a steady level the prices of commodities among a constantly increasing population.

* * * * *

History gives evidence of no more prolific source of human misery than a persistent and long continued fall in the general range of prices. But, although exercising so pernicious an influence, it is not itself a cause, but an effect.

When a fall of prices is found operating, not on one article or class of articles alone, but on the products of all industries; when found to be not confined to any one climate, country, or race of people, but to diffuse itself over the civilized world; when it is found not to be a characteristic of any one year, but to go on progressively for a series of years, it becomes manifest that it does not and can not arise from local, temporary, or subordinate causes, but must have its genesis and development in some principle of universal application.

What, then, is it that produces a general decline of prices in any country? It is produced by a shrinkage in the volume of money relatively to population and business, which has never yet failed to cause an increase in the value of the money unit, and a consequent decrease in the price of the commodities for which such unit is exchanged. If the volume of money in circulation be made to bear a direct and steady ratio to population and business, prices will be maintained at a steady level, and, what is of supreme importance, money will be kept of unchanging value. With an advancing civilization, in which a large volume of business is conducted on a basis of credit extending over long periods, it is of the uttermost importance that money, which is the measure of all equities, should be kept unchanging in value through time.

A reduction in the volume of money relatively to population and business, or, (to state the proposition in another form) a volume which remains stationary while population and business are increasing, has the effect of increasing the value of each unit of money, by increasing its purchasing power.

* * * * *

We have 22,000,000 workmen in this country. In order that they may be kept uninterruptedly employed it is absolutely necessary that business contracts and obligations be made long in advance. Accordingly, we read almost daily of the inception of industrial undertakings requiring years to fulfil. It is not too much to say that the suspension for one season of the making of time-contracts would close the factories, furnaces, and machine-shops of all civilized countries.

The natural concomitant of such a system of industry is the elaborate system of debt and credit which has grown up with it, and is indispensable to it. Any serious enhancement in the value of the unit of money between the time of making a contract or incurring a debt and the date of fulfilment or maturity always works hardship and frequently ruin to the contractor or debtor.

Three fourths of the business enterprises of this country are conducted on borrowed capital. Three fourths of the homes and farms that stand in the name of the actual occupants have been bought on time, and a very large proportion of them are mortgaged for the payment of some part of the purchase money.

Under the operation of a shrinkage in the volume of money this enormous mass of borrowers, at the maturity of their respective debts, though nominally paying no more than the amount borrowed, with interest, are, in reality, in the amount of the principal alone, returning a percentage of value greater than they received—more than in equity they contracted to pay, and oftentimes more, in substance, than they profited by the loan. To the man of business this percentage in many cases constitutes the difference between success and failure. Thus a shrinkage in the volume of money is the prolific source of bankruptcy and ruin. It is the canker that, unperceived and unsuspected, is eating out the prosperity of our people. By reason of the almost universal inattention to the nature and functions of money this evil is permitted, unobserved, to work widespread ruin and disaster. So subtle is it in its operations that it eludes the vigilance of the most acute. It baffles all foresight and calculation; it sets at naught all industry, all energy, all enterprise.

* * * * *

The advocates of the single gold standard deem even silver money much better money than greenbacks. Does it then follow that when greenbacks were our only money—good enough money to carry our nation through the greatest war in all history—we were "along-side" or underneath the barbarous nations of the world? It is not the form or material of a nation's money that fixes its status relatively to other nations. That is accomplished by the vitality, the energy, the intellectuality and effective force of its people. The United States can never be placed "alongside" any barbarous nation, except by compelling our people to compete with barbarous peoples—compelling them to sell the products of American labor at prices regulated by the cost of labor and manner of living in barbarous countries. As well might it be said that we are alongside the barbarous people of India because we continue to produce wheat and cotton.

The distinguishing feature of all barbarous nations is the squalor of their working classes. The reward of their hard toil is barely enough to maintain animal existence. A civilized people are placed alongside a barbarous one when, in their means of livelihood, the foundation of their civilization, they are made to compete with the barbarians. That was the result accomplished for the farmers and planters of the United States when silver was demonetized.

* * * * *

It is a remarkable circumstance, Mr. President, that throughout the entire range of economic discussion in gold-standard circles, it seems to be taken for granted that a change in the value of the money unit is a matter of no significance, and imports no mischief to society, so long as the change is in one direction. Who has ever heard from an Eastern journal any complaint against a contraction of our money volume; any admonition that in a shrinking volume of money lurk evils of the utmost magnitude? On the other hand, we have been treated to lengthy homilies on the evils of "inflation," whenever the slightest prospect presented itself to a decrease in the value of money—not with the view of giving the debtor an advantage over the lender of money, but of preventing the unconscionable injustice of a further increasing value in the dollars which the debtor contracted to pay. Loud and re-sounding protests have been entered against the "dishonesty" of making payments in "depreciated dollars." The debtors are characterized as dishonest for desiring to keep money at a steady and unwavering value. If that object could be secured, it would undoubtedly be to the interest of the debtor, and could not possibly work any injustice to the creditor. It would simply assure to both debtor and creditor the exact measure for which they bargained. It would enable the debtor to pay his debt with exactly the amount of sacrifice to which, on the making of the debt, he undertook to submit, in order to pay it.

In all discussions of the subject the creditors attempt to brush aside the equities involved by sneering at the debtors. But, Mr. President, debt is the distinguishing characteristic of modern society. It is through debt that the marvellous developments of the nineteenth-century civilization have been effected. Who are the debtors in this country? Who are the borrowers of money? The men of enterprise, of energy, of skill, the men of industry, of fore-sight, of calculation, of daring. In the ranks of the debtors will be found a large preponderance of the constructive energy of every country. The debtors are the upbuilders of the national wealth and prosperity; they are the men of initiative, the men who conceive plans and set on foot enterprises. They are those who by borrowing money enrich the community. They are the dynamic force among the people. They are the busy, restless, moving throng whom you find in all walks of life in this country—the active, the vigorous, the strong, the undaunted.

These men are sustained in their efforts by the hope and belief that their labors will be crowned with success. Destroy that hope and you take away from society the most powerful of all the incentives to material development; you place in the pathway of progress an obstacle which it is impossible to surmount.

The men of whom I have spoken are undoubtedly the first who are likely to be affected by a shrinkage in the volume of money.

The highest prosperity of a nation is attained only when all its people are employed in avocations suited to their individual aptitudes, and when a just money system insures an equitable distribution of the products of their industry. With our present complex civilization, in order that men may have constant employment, it is indispensable that work be planned and undertakings projected years in advance. Without an intelligent forecast of enterprises large numbers of workmen must periodically be relegated to idleness. Enterprises that take years to complete must be contracted for in advance, and payments provided for.

A constant but unperceived rise in the value of the dollar with which those payments must be made, baffles all plans, thwarts all calculation, and destroys all equities between debtor and creditor. If we cannot intelligently regulate our money volume so as to maintain unchanging the value of the money unit, if we cannot preserve our people from the blighting effects which an increase in the measuring power of the money unit entails upon all industry, to what purpose is our boasted civilization?

By the increase of that measuring power all hopes are disappointed, all purposes baffled, all efforts thwarted, all calculations defied. This subtle enlargement in the measuring power of the unit of money (the dollar) affects every class of the working community. Like a poisonous drug in the human body, it permeates every vein, every artery, every fibre and filament of the industrial structure. The debtor is fighting for his life against an enemy he does not see, against an influence he does not understand. For, while his calculations were well and intelligently made, and the amount of his debts and the terms of his contracts remain the same, the weight of all his obligations has been increased by an insidious increase in the value of the money unit.

* * * * *

In an ancient village there once stood a gold clock, which, ever since the invention of clocks, had been the measure of time for the people of that village. They were proud of its beauty, its workmanship, its musical stroke, and the unfailing regularity with which it heralded the passing hours. This clock had been endeared to all the inhabitants of the village by the hallowed associations with which it was identified. Generation after generation it had called the children from far and wide to attend the village school; its fresh morning peal had set the honest villagers to labor; its noonday notes had called them to refreshment; its welcome evening chime had summoned them to rest.

From time immemorial, on all festive occasions, it had rung out its merry tones to assemble the young people on the green; and on the Sabbath it had advertised to all the countryside the hour of worship in the village church. So perfect was its mechanism that it never needed repair. So proud were the people of this wonderful clock that it became the standard for all the country round about, and the time which it kept came to be known as the gold standard of time, which was universally admitted to be correct and unchanging.

In the course of time there wandered that way a queer character, a clock-maker, who being fully instructed in the inner workings of time-tellers, and not having inherited the traditions of that village, did not regard this clock with the veneration accorded to it by the natives. To their astonishment he denied that there was really any such thing as a gold standard of time; and in order to prove that the material, gold, did not monopolize all the qualities characteristic of clocks, he placed alongside the gold clock, another clock, of silver, and set both clocks at 12 noon. For a long time the clocks ran along in almost perfect accord, their only disagreement being that of an occasional second or two, and even that disagreement only at rare intervals, such as might naturally occur with the best of clocks. But the Council of the village, in their admiration for the gold clock, passed an ordinance requiring that all the weights (the motive power) of the silver clock, except one, be removed from it, and attached to those of the gold clock. Instantly the clocks began to fall apart, and one day, as the sun was passing the meridian, the hands of the gold clock were observed to indicate the hour of 1, while those of the silver clock indicated 12.15. At this everybody in the village ridiculed the silver clock, derided the silver standard, and hurled epithets at the individual who had had the temerity to doubt the infallibility of the gold standard.

Finally, the divergence between the clocks went so far that it was noon by the gold standard when it was only 6 A.M. by the silver standard, so that those who were guided by the gold standard, notwithstanding that it was yet the gray of the morning, insisted on eating their mid-day meal, because the gold standard indicated that it must be noon. And when the sun was high in the heavens, and its light was shining warm and refulgent on the dusty streets of the village, those who observed the gold standard had already eaten supper and were preparing for bed.

But this state of things could not last. It was clear that the difference between the standards must be reconciled, or all industry would be disarranged and the village ruined.

Discussion was rife among the villagers as to the cause of the difference. Some said the silver clock had lost time; others that both clocks had lost time, but the silver clock more than the gold; while others again asserted that both clocks had gained time, but that the gold clock had gained more than the silver clock.

While this discussion was at its height a philosopher came along and observing the excitement on the subject remarked: "By measuring two things, one against the other, you can never arrive at any determination as to which has changed. Instead of disputing as to whether one clock has lost or another gained would it not be well to consult the sun and the stars and ascertain exactly what has happened?"

Some demurred to this because, as they asserted, the gold standard was unchanging and was always right no matter how much it might seem to be wrong; others agreed that the philosopher's advice should be taken. Upon consulting the sun and the stars it was discovered that what had happened was that both clocks had gained in time but that the gain of the silver clock had been very slight, while that of the gold clock had been so great as to disturb all industry and destroy all correct sense of time.

Nothwithstanding this demonstration, there were many who adhered to the belief that the gold standard was correct and unchanging, and insisted that what appeared to be its aberrations were not in reality due to any fault of the gold clock, but to some convulsion of nature by which the solar system had been disarranged and the planets made to move irregularly in their orbits.

Some of the people also remembered having heard at the village inn, from travellers returning from the East, that silver clocks were the standard of time in India and other barbarous countries, while in countries of a more advanced civilization gold clocks were the standard. They therefore feared that the use of the silver clock might have the effect of degrading the civilization of the village by placing it alongside India and other barbarous countries. And although the great mass of the people really believed, from the demonstration made, that the silver standard of time was the better one, yet this objection was so momentous that they were puzzled what course to pursue, and at last advices were consulting the manufacturers of gold clocks as to what was best to be done.

Now our gold standard men are in the position of those who first refuse to look at anything beyond the two things, gold and silver, to see what has happened, and who, when it is finally demonstrated that all other things retain their former relations to silver, still persist that the law which makes gold an unchanging standard of measure is more immutable than that which holds the stars in their courses. If they will compare gold and silver with commodities in general, to see how the metals have maintained their relations, not to one another but to all other things, they will find that instead of a fall having taken place in the value of silver, the change that has really taken place is a rise in the value of both gold and silver, the rise in silver being relatively slight, while that of gold has been ruinously great. And those who do not shut their eyes to the truth must see that the change of relation between the metals has been effected by depriving silver of its legal-tender function, as the want of accord between the clocks was brought about by depriving the silver clock of a portion of its motive power—the weights. The only thing that has prevented a greater divergency between the metals is the limited coinage by the United States—the single weight that, withheld from the gold clock, prevented its more ruinous gain.

* * * * *

Everybody admits that the value of all other things is regulated by the play against each other of the forces of supply and demand. No reason has been or can be given why the value of the unit of money is not subject to this law.

The demand for money is equivalent to the sum of the demands for all other things whatsoever, for it is through a demand first made on money that all the wants of man are satisfied. The demand for money is instant, constant, and unceasing, and is always at a maximum. If any man wants a pair of shoes, or a suit of clothes, he does not make his demand first on the shoemaker, or clothier. No man, except a beggar, makes a demand directly for food, clothes, or any other article. Whether it be to obtain clothing, food, or shelter—whether the simplest necessity or the greatest luxury of life—it is on money that the demand is first made. As this rule operates throughout the entire range of commodities it is manifest that the demand for money equals at least the united demands for all other things.

While population remains stationary, the demand for money will remain the same. As the demand for one article becomes less, the demand for some other which shall take its place becomes greater. The demand for money, therefore, must ever be as pressing and urgent as the needs of man are varied, incessant, and importunate.

Such being the demand for money, what is the supply? It is the total number of units of money in circulation (actual or potential) in any country.

The force of the demand for money operating against the supply is represented by the earnest, incessant struggle to obtain it. All men, in all trades and occupations, are offering either property or services for money. Each shoemaker in each locality is in competition with every other shoemaker in the same locality, each hatter is in competition with every other hatter, each clothier with every other clothier, all offering their wares for units of money. In this universal and perpetual competition for money, that number of shoemakers that can supply the demand for shoes at the smallest average price (excellence of quality being taken into account) will fix the market value of shoes in money; and conversely, will fix the value of money in shoes. So with the hatters as to hats, so with the tailors as to clothes, and so with those engaged in all other occupations as to the products respectively of their labor.

The transcendent importance of money, and the constant pressure of the demand for it, may be realized by comparing its utility with that of any other force that contributes to human welfare.

In all the broad range of articles that in a state of civilization are needed by man, the only absolutely indispensable thing is money. For everything else there is some substitute—some alternative; for money there is none. Among articles of food, if beef rises in price, the demand for it will diminish, as a certain proportion of the people will resort to other forms of food. If, by reason of its continued scarcity, beef continues to rise, the demand will further diminish, until finally it may altogether cease and centre on something else. So in the matter of clothing. If any one fabric becomes scarce, and consequently dear, the demand will diminish, and, if the price continue rising, it is only a question of time for the demand to cease and be transferred to some alternative.

But this cannot be the case with money. It can never be driven out of use. There is not, and there never can be, any substitute for it. It may become so scarce that one dollar at the end of a decade may buy ten times as much as at the beginning; that is to say, it may cost in labor or commodities ten times as much to get it, but at whatever cost, the people must have it. Without money the demands of civilization could not be supplied.



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS,

OF NEW YORK (BORN 1824, DIED 1892.)

ON THE SPOILS SYSTEM AND THE PROGRESS OF CIVIL SERVICE REFORM.

An Address delivered before the American Social Science Association at its Meeting in Saratoga, New York, September 8, 1881.

Twelve years ago I read a paper before this association upon reform in the Civil Service. The subject was of very little interest. A few newspapers which were thought to be visionary occasionally discussed it, but the press of both parties smiled with profound indifference. Mr. Jenckes had pressed it upon an utterly listless Congress, and his proposition was regarded as the harmless hobby of an amiable man, from which a little knowledge of practical politics would soon dismount him. The English reform, which was by far the most significant political event in that country since the parliamentary reform bill of 1832, was virtually unknown to us. To the general public it was necessary to explain what the Civil Service was, how it was recruited, what the abuses were, and how and why they were to be remedied. Old professional politicians, who look upon reform as Dr. Johnson defined patriotism, as the last refuge of a scoundrel, either laughed at what they called the politics of idiocy and the moon, or sneered bitterly that reformers were cheap hypocrites who wanted other people's places and lamented other people's sins.

This general public indifference was not surprising. The great reaction of feeling which followed the war, the relaxation of the long-strained anxiety of the nation for its own existence, the exhaustion of the vast expenditure of life and money, and the satisfaction with the general success, had left little disposition to do anything but secure in the national polity the legitimate results of the great contest. To the country, reform was a proposition to reform evils of administration of which it knew little, and which, at most, seemed to it petty and impertinent in the midst of great affairs. To Congress, it was apparently a proposal to deprive members of the patronage which to many of them was the real gratification of their position, the only way in which they felt their distinction and power. To such members reform was a plot to deprive the bear of his honey, the dog of his bone, and they stared and growled incredulously.

This was a dozen years ago. To-day the demand for reform is imperative. The drop has become a deluge. Leading journals of both parties eagerly proclaim its urgent necessity. From New England to California public opinion is organizing itself in reform associations. In the great custom-house and the great post-office of the country—those in the city of New York—reform has been actually begun upon definite principles and with remarkable success, and the good example has been followed elsewhere with the same results. A bill carefully prepared and providing for gradual and thorough reform has been introduced with an admirable report in the Senate of the United States. Mr. Pendleton, the Democratic Senator from Ohio, declares that the Spoils System which has debauched the Civil Service of fifty millions of people must be destroyed. Mr. Dawes, the Republican Senator from Massachusetts, summons all good citizens to unite to suppress this gigantic evil which threatens the republic. Conspicuous reformers sit in the Cabinet; and in this sorrowful moment, at least, the national heart and mind and conscience, stricken and bowed by a calamity whose pathos penetrates every house-hold in Christendom, cries to these warning words, "Amen! Amen!" Like the slight sound amid the frozen silence of the Alps that loosens and brings down the avalanche, the solitary pistol-shot of the 2d of July has suddenly startled this vast accumulation of public opinion into conviction, and on every side thunders the rush and roar of its overwhelming descent, which will sweep away the host of evils bred of this monstrous abuse.

This is an extraordinary change for twelve years, but it shows the vigorous political health, the alert common-sense, and the essential patriotism of the country, which are the earnest of the success of any wise reform. The war which naturally produced the lassitude and indifference to the subject which were evident twelve years ago had made reform, indeed, a vital necessity, but the necessity was not then perceived. The dangers that attend a vast system of administration based to its least detail upon personal patronage were not first exposed by Mr. Jenckes in 1867, but before that time they had been mainly discussed as possibilities and inferences. Yet the history of the old New York council of appointment had illustrated in that State the party fury and corruption which patronage necessarily breeds, and Governor McKean in Pennsylvania, at the close of the last century, had made "a clean sweep" of the places within his power. The spoils spirit struggled desperately to obtain possession of the national administration from the day of Jefferson's inauguration to that of Jackson's, when it succeeded. Its first great but undesigned triumph was the decision of the First Congress in 1789, vesting the sole power of removal in the President, a decision which placed almost every position in the Civil Service unconditionally at his pleasure. This decision was determined by the weight of Madison's authority. But Webster, nearly fifty years afterwards, opposing his authority to that of Madison, while admitting the decision to have been final, declared it to have been wrong. The year 1820, which saw the great victory of slavery in the Missouri Compromise, was also the year in which the second great triumph of the spoils system was gained, by the passage of the law which, under the plea of securing greater responsibility in certain financial offices, limited such offices to a term of four years. The decision of 1789, which gave the sole power of removal to the President, required positive executive action to effect removal; but this law of 1820 vacated all the chief financial offices, with all the places dependent upon them, during the term of every President, who, without an order of removal, could fill them all at his pleasure.

A little later a change in the method of nominating the President from a congressional caucus to a national convention still further developed the power of patronage as a party resource, and in the session of 1825-26, when John Quincy Adams was President, Mr. Benton introduced his report upon Mr. Macon's resolution declaring the necessity of reducing and regulating executive patronage; although Mr. Adams, the last of the Revolutionary line of Presidents, so scorned to misuse patronage that he leaned backward in standing erect. The pressure for the overthrow of the constitutional system had grown steadily more angry and peremptory with the progress of the country, the development of party spirit, the increase of patronage, the unanticipated consequences of the sole executive power of removal, and the immense opportunity offered by the four-years' law. It was a pressure against which Jefferson held the gates by main force, which was relaxed by the war under Madison and the fusion of parties under Monroe, but which swelled again into a furious torrent as the later parties took form. John Quincy Adams adhered, with the tough tenacity of his father's son, to the best principles of all his predecessors. He followed Washington, and observed the spirit of the Constitution in refusing to remove for any reason but official misconduct or incapacity. But he knew well what was coming, and with characteristically stinging sarcasm he called General Jackson's inaugural address "a threat of re-form." With Jackson's administration in 1830 the deluge of the spoils system burst over our national politics. Sixteen years later, Mr. Buchanan said in a public speech that General Taylor would be faithless to the Whig party if he did not proscribe Democrats. So high the deluge had risen which has ravaged and wasted our politics ever since, and the danger will be stayed only when every President, leaning upon the law, shall stand fast where John Quincy Adams stood.

But the debate continued during the whole Jackson administration. In the Senate and on the stump, in elaborate reports and popular speeches, Webster, Calhoun, and Clay, the great political chiefs of their time, sought to alarm the country with the dangers of patronage. Sargent S. Prentiss, in the House of Representatives, caught up and echoed the cry under the administration of Van Buren. But the country refused to be alarmed. As the Yankee said of the Americans at the battle of White Plains, where they were beaten, "The fact is, as far as I can understand, our folks did n't seem to take no sort of interest in that battle." The reason that the country took no sort of interest in the discussion of the evils of patronage was evident. It believed the denunciation to be a mere party cry, a scream of disappointment and impotence from those who held no places and controlled no patronage. It heard the leaders of the opposition fiercely arraigning the administration for proscription and universal wrong-doing, but it was accustomed by its English tradition and descent always to hear the Tories cry that the Constitution was in danger when the Whigs were in power, and the Whigs under a Tory administration to shout that all was lost. It heard the uproar like the old lady upon her first railroad journey, who sat serene amid the wreck of a collision, and when asked if she was much hurt, looked over her spectacles and answered, blandly, "Hurt? Why, I supposed they always stopped so in this kind of travelling." The feeling that the denunciation was only a part of the game of politics, and no more to be accepted as a true statement than Snug the joiner as a true lion, was confirmed by the fact that when the Whig opposition came into power with President Harrison, it adopted the very policy which under Democratic administration it had strenuously denounced as fatal. The pressure for place was even greater than it had been ten years before, and although Mr. Webster as Secretary of State maintained his consistency by putting his name to an executive order asserting sound principles, the order was swept away like a lamb by a locomotive.

Nothing but a miracle, said General Harrison's attorney-general, can feed the swarm of hungry office-seekers.

Adopted by both parties, Mr. Marcy's doctrine that the places in the public service are the proper spoils of a victorious party, was accepted as a necessary condition of popular government. One of the highest officers of the government expounded this doctrine to me long afterwards. "I believe," said he, "that when the people vote to change a party administration they vote to change every person of the opposite party who holds a place, from the President of the United States to the messenger at my door." It is this extraordinary but sincere misconception of the function of party in a free government that leads to the serious defence of the spoils system. Now, a party is merely a voluntary association of citizens to secure the enforcement of a certain policy of administration upon which they are agreed. In a free government this is done by the election of legislators and of certain executive officers who are friendly to that policy. But the duty of the great body of persons employed in the minor administrative places is in no sense political. It is wholly ministerial, and the political opinions of such persons affect the discharge of their duties no more than their religious views or their literary preferences. All that can be justly required of such persons, in the interest of the public business, is honesty, intelligence, capacity, industry, and due subordination; and to say that, when the policy of the Government is changed by the result of an election from protection to free-trade, every book-keeper and letter-carrier and messenger and porter in the public offices ought to be a free-trader, is as wise as to say that if a merchant is a Baptist every clerk in his office ought to be a believer in total immersion. But the officer of whom I spoke undoubtedly expressed the general feeling. The necessarily evil consequences of the practice which he justified seemed to be still speculative and inferential, and to the national indifference which followed the war the demand of Mr. Jenckes for reform appeared to be a mere whimsical vagary most inopportunely introduced.

It was, however, soon evident that the war had made the necessity of reform imperative, and chiefly for two reasons: first, the enormous increase of patronage, and second, the fact that circumstances had largely identified a party name with patriotism. The great and radical evil of the spoils system was carefully fostered by the apparent absolute necessity to the public welfare of making political opinion and sympathy a condition of appointment to the smallest place. It is since the war, therefore, that the evil has run riot and that its consequences have been fully revealed. Those consequences are now familiar, and I shall not describe them. It is enough that the most patriotic and intelligent Americans and the most competent foreign observers agree that the direct and logical results of that system are the dangerous confusion of the executive and legislative powers of the Government; the conversion of politics into mere place-hunting; the extension of the mischief to State and county and city administration, and the consequent degradation of the national character; the practical disfranchisement of the people wherever the system is most powerful; and the perversion of a republic of equal citizens into a despotism of venal politicians. These are the greatest dangers that can threaten a republic, and they are due to the practice of treating the vast system of minor public places which are wholly ministerial, and whose duties are the same under every party administration, not as public trusts, but as party perquisites. The English-speaking race has a grim sense of humor, and the absurdity of transacting the public business of a great nation in a way which would ruin both the trade and the character of a small huckster, of proceeding upon the theory—for such is the theory of the spoils system—that a man should be put in charge of a locomotive because he holds certain views of original sin, or because he polishes boots nimbly with his tongue—it is a folly so stupendous and grotesque that when it is fully perceived by the shrewd mother-wit of the Yankee it will be laughed indignantly and contemptuously away. But the laugh must have the method, and the indignation the form, of law; and now that the public mind is aroused to the true nature and tendency of the spoils system is the time to consider the practicable legal remedy for them.

The whole system of appointments in the Civil Service proceeds from the President, and in regard to his action the intention of the Constitution is indisputable. It is that the President shall appoint solely upon public considerations, and that the officer appointed shall serve as long as he discharges his duty faithfully. This is shown in Mr. Jefferson's familiar phrase in his reply to the remonstrance of the merchants of New Haven against the removal of the collector of that port. Mr. Jefferson asserted that Mr. Adams had purposely appointed in the last moments of his administration officers whose designation he should have left to his successor. Alluding to these appointments, he says: "I shall correct the procedure, and that done, return with joy to that state of things when the only question concerning a candidate shall be, Is he honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?" Mr. Jefferson here recognizes that these had been the considerations which had usually determined appointments; and Mr. Madison, in the debate upon the President's sole power of removal, declared that if a President should remove an officer for any reason not connected with efficient service he would be impeached. Reform, therefore, is merely a return to the principle and purpose of the Constitution and to the practice of the early administrations.

What more is necessary, then, for reform than that the President should return to that practice? As all places in the Civil Service are filled either by his direct nomination or by officers whom he appoints, why has not any President ample constitutional authority to effect at any moment a complete and thorough reform? The answer is simple. He has the power. He has always had it. A President has only to do as Washington did, and all his successors have only to do likewise, and reform would be complete. Every President has but to refuse to remove non-political officers for political or personal reasons; to appoint only those whom he knows to be competent; to renominate, as Monroe and John Quincy Adams did, every faithful officer whose commission expires, and to require the heads of departments and all inferior appointing officers to conform to this practice, and the work would be done. This is apparently a short and easy and constitutional method of reform, requiring no further legislation or scheme of procedure. But why has no President adopted it? For the same reason that the best of Popes does not reform the abuses of his Church. For the same reason that a leaf goes over Niagara. It is because the opposing forces are overpowering. The same high officer of the government to whom I have alluded said to me as we drove upon the Heights of Washington, "Do you mean that I ought not to appoint my subordinates for whom I am responsible?" I answered: "I mean that you do not appoint them now; I mean that if, when we return to the capital, you hear that your chief subordinate is dead, you will not appoint his successor. You will have to choose among the men urged upon you by certain powerful politicians. Undoubtedly you ought to appoint the man whom you believe to be the most fit. But you do not and can not. If you could or did appoint such men only, and that were the rule of your department and of the service, there would be no need of reform." And he could not deny it. There was no law to prevent his selection of the best man. Indeed, the law assumed that he would do it. The Constitution intended that he should do it. But when I reminded him that there were forces beyond the law that paralyzed the intention of the Constitution, and which would inevitably compel him to accept the choice of others, he said no more.

It is easy to assert that the reform of the Civil Service is an executive reform. So it is. But the Executive alone cannot accomplish it.

The abuses are now completely and aggressively organized, and the sturdiest President would quail before them. The President who should undertake, single-handed, to deal with the complication of administrative evils known as the Spoils System would find his party leaders in Congress and their retainers throughout the country arrayed against him; the proposal to disregard traditions and practices which are regarded as essential to the very existence and effectiveness of party organization would be stigmatized as treachery, and the President himself would be covered with odium as a traitor. The air would hum with denunciation. The measures he should favor, the appointments he might make, the recommendations of his secretaries, would be opposed and imperilled, and the success of his administration would be endangered. A President who should alone undertake thoroughly to reform the evil must feel it to be the vital and paramount issue, and must be willing to hazard everything for its success. He must have the absolute faith and the indomitable will of Luther. "Here stand I; I can no other." How can we expect a President whom this system elects to devote himself to its destruction? General Grant, elected by a spontaneous patriotic impulse, fresh from the regulated order of military life and new to politics and politicians, saw the reason and the necessity of reform. The hero of a victorious war, at the height of his popularity, his party in undisputed and seemingly indisputable supremacy, made the attempt. Congress, good-naturedly tolerating what it considered his whim of inexperience, granted money to try an experiment. The adverse pressure was tremendous. "I am used to pressure," said the soldier. So he was, but not to this pressure. He was driven by unknown and incalculable currents. He was enveloped in whirlwinds of sophistry, scorn, and incredulity. He who upon his own line had fought it out all summer to victory, upon a line absolutely new and unknown was naturally bewildered and dismayed. So Wellington had drawn the lines of victory on the Spanish Peninsula and had saved Europe at Waterloo. But even Wellington at Waterloo could not be also Sir Robert Peel at Westminster. Even Wellington, who had overthrown Napoleon in the field, could not also be the parliamentary hero who for the welfare of his country would dare to risk the overthrow of his party.

When at last President Grant said, "If Congress adjourns without positive legislation on Civil Service reform, I shall regard such action as a disapproval of the system and shall abandon it," it was, indeed, a surrender, but it was the surrender of a champion who had honestly mistaken both the nature and the strength of the adversary and his own power of endurance.

It is not, then, reasonable, under the conditions of our Government and in the actual situation, to expect a President to go much faster or much further than public opinion. But executive action can aid most effectively the development and movement of that opinion, and the most decisive reform measures that the present administration might take would be undoubtedly supported by a powerful public sentiment. The educative results of resolute executive action, however limited and incomplete in scope, have been shown in the two great public offices of which I have spoken, the New York custom-house and the New York post-office. For nearly three years the entire practicability of reform has been demonstrated in those offices, and solely by the direction of the President. The value of such demonstrations, due to the Executive will alone, carried into effect by thoroughly trained and interested subordinates, cannot be overestimated. But when they depend upon the will of a transient officer and not upon a strong public conviction, they are seeds that have no depth of soil. A vital and enduring reform in administrative methods, although it be but a return to the constitutional intention, can be accomplished only by the commanding impulse of public opinion. Permanence is secured by law, not by individual pleasure. But in this country law is only formulated public opinion. Reform of the Civil Service does not contemplate an invasion of the constitutional prerogative of the President and the Senate, nor does it propose to change the Constitution by statute. The whole system of the Civil Service proceeds, as I said, from the President, and the object of the reform movement is to enable him to fulfil the intention of the Constitution by revealing to him the desire of the country through the action of its authorized representatives. When the ground-swell of public opinion lifts Congress from the rocks, the President will gladly float with it into the deep water of wise and patriotic action. The President, indeed, has never been the chief sinner in the Spoils System, although he has been the chief agent. Even President Jackson yielded to party pressure as much as to his own convictions. President Harrison sincerely wished to stay the flood, but it swept him away. President Grant doubtfully and with good intentions tested the pressure before yielding. President Hayes, with sturdy independence, adhered inflexibly to a few points, but his party chiefs cursed and derided him. President Garfield,—God bless and restore him!—frankly declares permanent and effective reform to be impossible without the consent of Congress. When, therefore, Congress obeys a commanding public opinion, and reflects it in legislation, it will restore to the President the untrammelled exercise of his ample constitutional powers according to the constitutional intention; and the practical question of reform is, How shall this be brought about?

Now, it is easy to kill weeds if we can destroy their roots, and it is not difficult to determine what the principle of reform legislation should be if we can agree upon the source of the abuses to be reformed. May they not have a common origin? In fact, are they not all bound together as parts of one system? The Representative in Congress, for instance, does not ask whether the interests of the public service require this removal or that appointment, but whether, directly or indirectly, either will best serve his own interests. The Senator acts from the same motives. The President, in turn, balances between the personal interests of leading politicians—President, Senators, and Representatives all wishing to pay for personal service and to conciliate personal influence. So also the party labor required of the place-holder, the task of carrying caucuses, of defeating one man and electing another, as may be ordered, the payment of the assessment levied upon his salary—all these are the price of the place. They are the taxes paid by him as conditions of receiving a personal favor. Thus the abuses have a common source, whatever may be the plea for the system from which they spring. Whether it be urged that the system is essential to party organization, or that the desire for place is a laudable political ambition, or that the Spoils System is a logical development of our political philosophy, or that new brooms sweep clean, or that any other system is un-American—whatever the form of the plea for the abuse, the conclusion is always the same, that the minor places in the Civil Service are not public trusts, but rewards and prizes for personal and political favorites.

The root of the complex evil, then, is personal favoritism. This produces congressional dictation, senatorial usurpation, arbitrary removals, interference in elections, political assessments, and all the consequent corruption, degradation, and danger that experience has disclosed. The method of reform, therefore, must be a plan of selection for appointment which makes favoritism impossible. The general feeling undoubtedly is that this can be accomplished by a fixed limited term. But the terms of most of the offices to which the President and the Senate appoint, and upon which the myriad minor places in the service depend, have been fixed and limited for sixty years, yet it is during that very period that the chief evils of personal patronage have appeared. The law of 1820, which limited the term of important revenue offices to four years, and which was afterwards extended to other offices, was intended, as John Quincy Adams tells us, to promote the election to the presidency of Mr. Crawford, who was then Secretary of the Treasury. The law was drawn by Mr. Crawford himself, and it was introduced into the Senate by one of his devoted partisans. It placed the whole body of executive financial officers at the mercy of the Secretary of the Treasury and of a majority of the Senate, and its design, as Mr. Adams says, "was to secure for Mr. Crawford the influence of all the incumbents in office, at the peril of displacement, and of five or ten times an equal number of ravenous office-seekers, eager to supplant them." This is the very substance of the Spoils System, intentionally introduced by a fixed limitation of term in place of the constitutional tenure of efficient service; and it was so far successful that it made the custom-house officers, district attorneys, marshals, registers of the land-office, receivers of public money, and even paymasters in the army, notoriously active partisans of Mr. Crawford. Mr. Benton says that the four-years' law merely made the dismissal of faithful officers easier, because the expiration of the term was regarded as "the creation of a vacancy to be filled by new appointments." A fixed limited term for the chief offices has not destroyed or modified personal influence, but, on the contrary, it has fostered universal servility and loss of self-respect, because reappointment depends, not upon official fidelity and efficiency, but upon personal influence and favor. To fix by law the terms of places dependent upon such offices would be like an attempt to cure hydrophobia by the bite of a mad dog. The incumbent would be always busy keeping his influence in repair to secure reappointment, and the applicant would be equally busy in seeking such influence to procure the place, and as the fixed terms would be constantly expiring, the eager and angry intrigue and contest of influence would be as endless as it is now. This certainly would not be reform.

But would not reform be secured by adding to a fixed limited term the safeguard of removal for cause only? Removal for cause alone means, of course, removal for legitimate cause, such as dishonesty, negligence, or incapacity. But who shall decide that such cause exists? This must be determined either by the responsible superior officer or by some other authority. But if left to some other authority the right of counsel and the forms of a court would be invoked; the whole legal machinery of mandamuses, injunctions, certioraris, and the rules of evidence would be put in play to keep an incompetent clerk at his desk or a sleepy watchman on his beat. Cause for the removal of a letter-carrier in the post-office or of an accountant in the custom-house would be presented with all the pomp of impeachment and established like a high crime and misdemeanor. Thus every clerk in every office would have a kind of vested interest in his place because, however careless, slovenly, or troublesome he might be, he could be displaced only by an elaborate and doubtful legal process. Moreover, if the head of a bureau or a collector, or a postmaster were obliged to prove negligence, or insolence, or incompetency against a clerk as he would prove theft, there would be no removals from the public service except for crimes of which the penal law takes cognizance. Consequently, removal would be always and justly regarded as a stigma upon character, and a man removed from a position in a public office would be virtually branded as a convicted criminal. Removal for cause, therefore, if the cause were to be decided by any authority but that of the responsible superior officer, instead of improving, would swiftly and enormously enhance the cost, and ruin the efficiency, of the public service, by destroying subordination, and making every lazy and worthless member of it twice as careless and incompetent as he is now.

If, then, the legitimate cause for removal ought to be determined in public as in private business by the responsible appointing power, it is of the highest public necessity that the exercise of that power should be made as absolutely honest and independent as possible. But how can it be made honest and independent if it is not protected so far as practicable from the constant bribery of selfish interest and the illicit solicitation of personal influence? The experience of our large patronage offices proves conclusively that the cause of the larger number of removals is not dishonesty or incompetency; it is the desire to make vacancies to fill. This is the actual cause, whatever cause may be assigned. The removals would not be made except for the pressure of politicians. But those politicians would not press for removals if they could not secure the appointment of their favorites. Make it impossible for them to secure appointment, and the pressure would instantly disappear and arbitrary removal cease.

So long, therefore, as we permit minor appointments to be made by mere personal influence and favor, a fixed limited term and removal during that term for cause only would not remedy the evil, because the incumbents would still be seeking influence to secure re-appointment, and the aspirants doing the same to replace them. Removal under plea of good cause would be as wanton and arbitrary as it is now, unless the power to remove were intrusted to some other discretion than that of the superior officer, and in that case the struggle for reappointment and the knowledge that removal for the term was practically impossible would totally demoralize the service. To make sure, then, that removals shall be made for legitimate cause only, we must provide that appointment shall be made only for legitimate cause.

All roads lead to Rome. Personal influence in appointments can be annulled only by free and open competition. By that bridge we can return to the practice of Washington and to the intention of the Constitution. That is the shoe of swiftness and the magic sword by which the President can pierce and outrun the protean enemy of sophistry and tradition which prevents him from asserting his power. If you say that success in a competitive literary examination does not prove fitness to adjust customs duties, or to distribute letters, or to appraise linen, or to measure molasses, I answer that the reform does not propose that fitness shall be proved by a competitive literary examination. It proposes to annul personal influence and political favoritism by making appointment depend upon proved capacity. To determine this it proposes first to test the comparative general intelligence of all applicants and their special knowledge of the particular official duties required, and then to prove the practical faculty of the most intelligent applicants by actual trial in the performance of the duties before they are appointed. If it be still said that success in such a competition may not prove fitness, it is enough to reply that success in obtaining the favor of some kind of boss, which is the present system, presumptively proves unfitness.

Nor is it any objection to the reformed system that many efficient officers in the service could not have entered it had it been necessary to pass an examination; it is no objection, because their efficiency is a mere chance. They were not appointed because of efficiency, but either because they were diligent politicians or because they were recommended by diligent politicians. The chance of getting efficient men in any business is certainly not diminished by inquiry and investigation. I have heard an officer in the army say that he could select men from the ranks for special duty much more satisfactorily than they could be selected by an examination. Undoubtedly he could, because he knows his men, and he selects solely by his knowledge of their comparative fitness. If this were true of the Civil Service, if every appointing officer chose the fittest person from those that he knew, there would be no need of reform. It is because he cannot do this that the reform is necessary.

It is the same kind of objection which alleges that competition is a droll plan by which to restore the conduct of the public business to business principles and methods, since no private business selects its agents by competition. But the managers of private business are virtually free from personal influence in selecting their subordinates, and they employ and promote and dismiss them solely for the interests of the business. Their choice, however, is determined by an actual, although not a formal, competition. Like the military officer, they select those whom they know by experience to be the most competent. But if great business-houses and corporations were exposed to persistent, insolent, and overpowering interference and solicitation for place such as obstructs great public departments and officers, they too would resort to the form of competition, as they now have its substance, and they would resort to it to secure the very freedom which they now enjoy of selecting for fitness alone.

Mr. President, in the old Arabian story, from the little box upon the sea-shore, carelessly opened by the fisherman, arose the towering and haughty demon, ever more monstrous and more threatening, who would not crouch again. So from the small patronage of the earlier day, from a Civil Service dealing with a national revenue of only $2,000,000, and regulated upon sound business principles, has sprung the un-American, un-Democratic, un-Republican system which destroys political independence, honor, and morality, and corrodes the national character itself. In the solemn anxiety of this hour the warning words of the austere Calhoun, uttered nearly half a century ago, echo in startled recollection like words of doom: "If you do not put this thing down it will put you down." Happily it is the historic faith of the race from which we are chiefly sprung, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. It is that faith which has made our mother England the great parent of free States. The same faith has made America the political hope of the world. Fortunately removed by our position from the entanglements of European politics, and more united and peaceful at home than at any time within the memory of living men, the moment is most auspicious for remedying that abuse in our political system whose nature, proportions, and perils the whole country begins clearly to discern. The will and the power to apply the remedy will be a test of the sagacity and the energy of the people. The reform of which I have spoken is essentially the people's reform. With the instinct of robbers who run with the crowd and lustily cry "Stop thief!" those who would make the public service the monopoly of a few favorites denounce the determination to open that service to the whole people as a plan to establish an aristocracy. The huge ogre of patronage, gnawing at the character, the honor, and the life of the country, grimly sneers that the people cannot help themselves and that nothing can be done. But much greater things have been done. Slavery was the Giant Despair of many good men of the last generation, but slavery was overthrown. If the Spoils System, a monster only less threatening than slavery, be unconquerable, it is because the country has lost its convictions, its courage, and its common-sense. "I expect," said the Yankee as he surveyed a stout antagonist, "I expect that you 're pretty ugly, but I cal'late I 'm a darned sight uglier." I know that patronage is strong, but I believe that the American people are very much stronger.