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people, will have no reason to complain if his sincerity is suspected and he is called a sham reformer.
I am aware of the objection to all this: that democratic government is necessarily government through political parties; that without the spoils of office as rewards of party service, political parties cannot be held together; and that, therefore, the abolition of the patronage would strike at the vitality of democratic government. This is a fallacy, conclusively proved to be such by our own history as well as by the existence of political parties without patronage in other countries. At the beginning of our own Federal Government there was not distribution of offices as party patronage, and yet there were political parties according to the difference of opinion on principles and politics. And those parties were very spirited and active. In England there was once political patronage in our sense, and it brought forth the characteristic crop of profligacy and corruption to an alarming degree. The patronage was thoroughly abolished and has not existed there for a considerable period. But there are political parties as before, only far purer in morals and more public-spirited in their activity. In Germany there are political parties without the slightest vestige of party patronage. Who will dare to say that only the citizens of this great republic have become so depraved as to be incapable of forming and maintaining political parties without being paid for it with the spoil of office? The man asserting so outrageous a thing should be denounced as a wicked slanderer of his country and people. Evidently there will be political parties after the abolition of the patronage, but they will indeed be different from the parties we have now. They will no longer be held together by “the cohesive power of public plunder,” but by the cohesive power of certain principles and policies, which their members hold in common, and for the prevalence of which they will together exert themselves. There will be party leaders, but they will be leaders of opinion, not mere captains and paymasters of organization. As to that matter of leadership, I am indeed not sanguine enough to expect that our model boss, Senator Thomas C. Platt, will, by the abolition of the patronage,
