have more or less contributed used by some of its beneficiaries to the end of undoing a great work to which we had devoted the best efforts of our lives, and to be, in addition, assailed with gross personal abuse for defending what the Republican party had solemnly promised to maintain and extend.
It is needless to say that I have the fullest confidence in your good faith, and this confidence inspires me with the hope that you will not take amiss a respectful suggestion which I venture to offer to your consideration. It seems to me that this whole reactionary effort might be checked by you with a few calm words to this effect: that you have always considered and do now consider the merit system a good thing in itself and in its effects a vast improvement upon former methods; that the Republican party has constantly declared itself to be of the same opinion; that it has solemnly pledged itself in its platform to maintain the reformed system and to extend it wherever practicable; that you as the official head of the party have confirmed that pledge and promise to make it good; that as a faithful chief magistrate and an honest man you feel yourself bound to redeem that promise in good faith; that no Republican ought to ask a President of his party to break his word to cease being an honest man and to disgrace the party itself by dishonoring its pledges; and that if any Republican asks you to do this thing, that is, to take any step backward and to refrain from extending the reformed civil service system wherever practicable, all you have to answer is that as a conscientious man, as a good Republican President, you cannot do it.
I am quite confident that such a simple and calm declaration coming from you would stop the whole hue and cry at once. And if they tried in Congress to force your hand by inserting in appropriation bills provisions exempting this or that class of employees from the civil service rules,
