warding party
workers from the public treasury.

On viewing this state of affairs, many a distinguished citizen became
profoundly discouraged. James Russell Lowell, for example, thought he
saw a steady decline in public morals. In 1865, hearing of Lee's
surrender, he had exclaimed: "There is something magnificent in having a
country to love!" Ten years later, when asked to write an ode for the
centennial at Philadelphia in 1876, he could think only of a biting
satire on the nation:

"Show your state legislatures; show your Rings;
And challenge Europe to produce such things
As high officials sitting half in sight
To share the plunder and fix things right.
If that don't fetch her, why, you need only
To show your latest style in martyrs,--Tweed:
She'll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears
At such advance in one poor hundred years."

When his critics condemned him for this "attack upon his native land,"
Lowell replied in sadness: "These fellows have no notion of what love of
country means. It was in my very blood and bones. If I am not an
American who ever was?... What fills me with doubt and dismay is the
degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of democracy?
Is ours a 'government of the people, by the people, for the people,' or
a Kakistocracy [a government of the worst], rather for the benefit of
knaves at the cost of fools?"

=The Reform Movement in Republican Ranks.=--The sentiments expressed by
Lowell, himself a Republican and for a time American ambassador to
England, were shared by many men in his party. Very soon after the close
of the Civil War some of them began to protest vigorously against the
policies and conduct of their leaders. In 1872, the dissenters, calling
themselves Liberal Republicans, broke away altogether, nominated a
candidate of their own, Horace Greeley, and put forward a platform
indicting the Republican President fiercely enough to please the most
uncompromising Democrat. They accused Grant of using "the powers and
opportunities of his high office for the promotion of personal ends."
They charged him with retaining "notoriously corrupt and unworthy men in
places of power and responsibility." They alleged that the Republican
party kept "alive the passions and resentments of the late civil war to
use them for their own advantages," and employed the "public service of
the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influenc