ation in office" prevails, little real
improvement even in the civil service can be looked for. But improvement
of the civil service, important as it is in itself, is an insignificant
object of aspiration compared with the general purification of political
life, the elevation of the public sentiment, the creation of a school of
statesmanship in that arena which is now only a mart for hucksters,
bargaining and wrangling, drowning all discussions and impeding all
transactions of a legitimate nature. The class who fill that arena and
block every avenue to it cannot be dispossessed so long as the system
which furnishes the capital and material for their traffic remains
unchanged. It is a matter of demonstration that if the civil service
were put on the same footing as in England and other European countries,
the machinery by which parties are now governed, not led, public spirit
stifled, not animated, legislation misdirected or reduced to impotence,
and "politics" and "politician" made by-words of reproach and objects of
contempt, must decay and perish. We are not setting up any ideal state
of things as the result, but only such as shall show a conformity
between our political life and our social life, exhibiting equal defects
but also equal merits in both, affording the same scope to honorable
ambition, healthy activity and right purpose in the one as in the other.
We are not calling for any change in the character of our institutions
or one which they afford no means of effecting, but the removal by a
method which they themselves provide of an incumbrance which impairs
their nature and impedes their working. No partial measure will
suffice--none that will depend for its efficacy on the disposition of
those whose duty it will be to enforce it--none that will be exposed to
the attacks of those whose interest it will be to reverse it. The end
can be secured neither by the action of the President nor by that of
Congress. Reform, in order that it may endure and bear fruit, must be
engrafted on the organic law, its principles made the subject of an
amendment to the Constitution, in which they should have been originally
incorporated.

It may be urged in reply that the present action of those who desire
Reform is of a preliminary character; that they are simply grasping the
instruments with which the work is to be done; that the ultimate object
can be achieved only in the distant future, when the nation has been
aroused to a sen