d, he
should receive that respect from others which so often aids in creating
self-respect--the most invaluable of all possessions.

CHAPTER V

APPLIED IDEALISM

In the spring of 1899 I was appointed by President Harrison Civil
Service Commissioner. For nearly five years I had not been very
active in political life; although I had done some routine work in the
organization and had made campaign speeches, and in 1886 had run for
Mayor of New York against Abram S. Hewitt, Democrat, and Henry George,
Independent, and had been defeated.

I served six years as Civil Service Commissioner--four years under
President Harrison and then two years under President Cleveland. I
was treated by both Presidents with the utmost consideration. Among my
fellow-Commissioners there was at one time ex-Governor Hugh Thompson, of
South Carolina, and at another time John R. Proctor, of Kentucky. They
were Democrats and ex-Confederate soldiers. I became deeply attached to
both, and we stood shoulder to shoulder in every contest in which the
Commission was forced to take part.

Civil Service Reform had two sides. There was, first, the effort to
secure a more efficient administration of the public service, and,
second, the even more important effort to withdraw the administrative
offices of the Government from the domain of spoils politics, and
thereby cut out of American political life a fruitful source of
corruption and degradation. The spoils theory of politics is that
public office is so much plunder which the victorious political party is
entitled to appropriate to the use of its adherents. Under this system
the work of the Government was often done well even in those days, when
Civil Service Reform was only an experiment, because the man running an
office if himself an able and far-sighted man, knew that inefficiency
in administration would be visited on his head in the long run, and
therefore insisted upon most of his subordinates doing good work; and,
moreover, the men appointed under the spoils system were necessarily
men of a certain initiative and power, because those who lacked these
qualities were not able to shoulder themselves to the front. Yet there
were many flagrant instances of inefficiency, where a powerful chief
quartered friend, adherent, or kinsman upon the Government. Moreover,
the necessarily haphazard nature of the employment, the need of
obtaining and holding the office by service wholly unconnected with
offic