, county, and town officials in New York, would
exclude from political action one voter out of every eight and
one-half. If this practical illustration exhibited the weakness of the
President's order it also anticipated what the country afterwards
recognised, that true reform must rest upon competitive examination
for which the Act of March 3, 1871 opened the way, and which President
Hayes had directed for certain positions.

[Footnote 1572: Appleton's _Cyclopaedia_, 1877, pp. 562-563.]

But despite the platform's good points, George William Curtis,
construing its failure to endorse the Administration into censure of
the President, quickly offered a resolution declaring Hayes's title to
the presidency as clear and perfect as that of George Washington, and
commending his efforts in the permanent pacification of the South and
for the correction of abuses in the civil service.[1573] Curtis had
never sought political advantage for personal purposes. The day he
drifted away from a clerkship in a business firm and landed among the
philosophers of Brook Farm he became an idealist, whom a German
university and years of leisure travel easily strengthened. So fixed
was his belief of moral responsibility that he preferred, after his
unfortunate connection with _Putnam's Magazine_, to lose his whole
fortune and drudge patiently for sixteen years to pay a debt of
$60,000 rather than invoke the law and escape legal liability. He was
an Abolitionist when abolitionism meant martyrdom; he became a
Republican when others continued Whigs; and he stood for Lincoln and
emancipation in the months of dreadful discouragement preceding
Sheridan's victories in the Shenandoah. He was likewise a civil
service reformer long in advance of a public belief, or any belief at
all, that the custom of changing non-political officers on merely
political grounds impaired the efficiency of the public service,
lowered the standard of political contests, and brought reproach upon
the government and the people. It is not surprising, therefore, that
he stood for a President who sought to re-establish a reform that had
broken down under Grant, and although the effort rested upon an
Executive order, without the permanency of law, he believed that any
attempt to inaugurate a new system should have the undivided support
of the party which had demanded it in convention and had elected a
President pledged to establish it. Moreover, the President had offered
Curtis h