isastrous influence going. There was no
trained Civil Service with its unpartisan traditions. In the case of
offices corresponding to those of our permanent heads of departments it
seemed reasonable that the official should, like his chief the Minister
concerned, be a person in harmony with the President. As to the smaller
offices--the thousands of village postmasterships and so forth--one man
was likely to do the work as well as another; the dispossessed official
could, in the then condition of the country, easily find another equally
lucrative employment; "turn and turn about" seemed to be the rule of fair
play.

There were now few genuine issues in politics. Compromise on vital
questions was understood to be the highest statesmanship. The
Constitution itself, with its curious system of checks and balances,
rendered it difficult to bring anything to pass. Added to this was a
party system with obvious natural weaknesses, infected from the first
with a dangerous malady. The political life, which lay on the surface of
the national life of America, thus began to assume an air of futility,
and, it must be added, of squalor. Only, Englishmen, recollecting the
feebleness and corruption which marked their aristocratic government
through a great part of the eighteenth century, must not enlarge their
phylacteries at the expense of American democracy. And it is yet more
important to remember that the fittest machinery for popular government,
the machinery through which the real judgment of the people will prevail,
can only by degrees and after many failures be devised. Popular
government was then young, and it is young still.

So much for the great world of politics in those days. But in or about
1830 a Quaker named Lundy had, as Quakers used to say, "a concern" to
walk 125 miles through the snow of a New England winter and speak his
mind to William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was a poor man who, like
Franklin, had raised himself as a working printer, and was now occupied
in philanthropy. Stirred up by Lundy, he succeeded after many painful
experiences, in gaol and among mobs, in publishing in Boston on January
1, 1831, the first number of the Liberator. In it he said: "I shall
strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave
population. I will be as hard as truth and as uncompromising as justice.
I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single
inch; and I will be heard." Thi