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cenary element to political activity, but do everything we can to drive it out of that political life. We must strive to convince the popular mind that while political parties must have organization, party machines consisting of patronage-mongers and bribe-givers as leaders, with hordes of patronage-hunters and bribe-takers at their command, are not only not necessary to the existence or efficiency of political parties but will deprive parties of their moral vitality, and turn them into mere agencies of general robbery and spoliation.
Nothing could be more deceptive and dangerous than the doctrine that if one party has such a machine, the other one must have one, too, in order to fight the devil with fire. If the observance of this doctrine were carried to its logical consequences, it would turn our party contests simply into something like two or more devils fighting each other with fire. Where two bosses, and the head of two parties respectively, fight one another, this is actually and visibly the case. The peculiarity of these pyrotechnical contests is that not the devils themselves but the people are scorched and roasted.
To put an end to this abominable state of things, there is no other effective means than to deprive the devils as much as possible of their fuel—that is, of their means of bribery; to strip them of their patronage by the greatest practicable extension of civil service reform, and then also to restrict the use of money in elections to the narrowest attainable limits by corrupt practices laws. The latter has been tried, so far with little success, but it is to be hoped that experience will suggest more effective methods, and that the moral sense and the enlightened opinion of the people will compel their introduction and enforcement, as it has compelled the establishment, and is compelling the maintenance of the merit system in the National civil service against all the open assaults and hidden intrigues of spoils politicians.
How strong on our side that moral sense and public opinion have become was strikingly manifested by the signal failure of the anti-civil service reform campaign in the last session of Congress. Every imaginable enginery of warfare was set in motion. There was a committee to investigate the practical working of the civil service rules, by which the enemies of the merit system expected to bring to light its uselessness, or at least striking abuses in its administration. There
