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We have on occasions like this so frequently reiterated our demand for the repeal of the pernicious four year's term law, and supported that demand with elaborate argument that I might abstain from anything more than a passing notice of that subject had not the principle involved in the four year's term law been recently recognized by the enemies of civil service reform in the Chicago Convention as the surest means to destroy the merit system. With the natural instinct of the spirit of mischief they hit upon the poison which, if injected into the body of the public service at large, would mot unfailingly kill every reform that has been accomplished in it. The general introduction of “fixed terms of office” which the Chicago platform calls for, and which, as already mentioned, means nothing else than a general change in public places, large and small, in the departments at Washington, as well as in the country, with every change of administration, would result in a quadrennial spoils debauch so monstrous—more and more monstrous as the government machinery grows—it would bring forth a demoralization in the service and among the people so far-reaching and rank, and it would injure the public interest so disastrously, that the imagination fairly recoils from the picture. Happily the defeat of the plotters removed the danger of its realization. But the fact of the fixed term principle having again been proposed as the surest anti-reform poison most forcibly recalls the attention of all friends of good government to the actual existence of a law embodying this very principle of evil—a law which, although fortunately applying only to a comparatively small number of offices, has done more than any other act of legislation to develop the evils of the spoils system and to demoralize the service, and has for this reason been emphatically condemned by almost all the great statesmen of the past, from Jefferson and Madison to Webster and Clay. Having been thus impressively reminded again of the utter viciousness of the principle embodied in that law, may we not hope that a new effort may succeed in bringing about its annulment?
The party which was victorious in the late national election stands upon this platform: “The Civil Service law was placed upon the statute books by the Republican party which has always sustained it, and we renew our repeated declaration that
