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party spoil, and no bands of mercenary party workers living on politics, party contests are as energetic as they are here.
Must we then admit it to be a fact that while in other countries parties can be maintained without official spoils, and while in this Republic, too, they have in former times been so kept in energetic vitality, the American people have become so mercenary and degraded that they will not give any time or work to their public interests unless they are individually bribed to do so? Have we sunk so low? But if we had, would the substitution of one kind of bribe for another furnish any remedy for this appalling evil? For the distribution of money in the guise of official salaries to party workers is no less a bribe than cash itself. Would not the result of the complete restoration of the spoils system be that those who now demand money for their patriotism, would then demand money and offices, too? Do they not do so now, wherever the offices are still attainable? Is is not true, as a matter of history, that it was the use of offices as a means of bribery that gradually developed the mercenary spirit in our politics? And will not this mercenary spirit, started and stimulated by the partisan use of the patronage, necessarily spread more widely the more it has to feed upon? The spoils system offered the mercenaries offices. The offices presently proved insufficient to satisfy their greed. They then exacted money in addition. They received money, together with the offices. Then certain classes of offices were withdrawn from their grasp, and they demanded more money. And now they simply want the offices back on the ground that they otherwise must insist upon still more money. Is it not certain that the return of the offices to their constantly widening greed would not satisfy, but only sharpen, the appetite?
The suggestion that under existing circumstances we cannot keep our political parties in effective activity without systematic bribery and corruption of some sort, and the fact that such a theory can be advanced with the expectation of its being accepted by good citizens, should only serve to open our eyes to the frightful character of the condition confronting us. It should convince us that the true remedy must be found in the direction of the complete abolition of political pelf.
We must not seek to satisfy the mercenary element, but to get on without it. We must not endeavor to attract the mer-
