conflict with many men of low ideals, both in Congress and without.
Roosevelt found a number of men in Congress--like Senator Lodge, Senator
Davis of Minnesota, Senator Platt of Connecticut, and Congressman
(afterward President) McKinley--who were sincerely and vigorously
opposed to the spoils system. But there were numbers of other Senators
and Congressmen who hated the whole reform--everything connected with
it and everybody who championed it. "Sometimes," Roosevelt said of these
men, "to use a legal phrase, their hatred was for cause, and sometimes
it was peremptory--that is, sometimes the Commission interfered with
their most efficient, and incidentally most corrupt and unscrupulous
supporters, and at other times, where there was no such interference,
a man nevertheless had an innate dislike of anything that tended to
decency in government."

Conflict with these men was inevitable. Sometimes their opposition took
the form of trying to cut down the appropriation for the Commission.

Then the Commission, on Roosevelt's suggestion, would try the effect of
holding no examinations in the districts of the Senators or Congressmen
who had voted against the appropriation. The response from the districts
was instantaneous. Frantic appeals came to the Commission from aspirants
for office. The reply would be suave and courteous. One can imagine
Roosevelt dictating it with a glint in his eye and a snap of the jaw,
and when it was typed, inserting a sting in the tail in the form of an
interpolated sentence in his own vigorous and rugged script. Those added
sentences, without which any typewritten Roosevelt letter might almost
be declared to be a forgery, so uniformly did the impulse to add them
seize him, were always the most interesting feature of a communication
from him. The letter would inform the protesting one that unfortunately
the appropriation had been cut, so that examinations could not be held
in every district, and that obviously the Commission could not neglect
the districts of those Congressmen who believed in the reform and
therefore in the examinations. The logical next step for the hungry
aspirant was to transfer the attack to his Congressman or Senator. In
the long run, by this simple device of backfiring, which may well have
been a reminiscence of prairie fire days in the West, the Commission
obtained enough money to carry on.

There were other forms of attack tried by the spoils-loving legislators.
One was