THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
and government clerkships and consulates and Indian agencies for the party hacks and his personal hangers-on. And he must keep on good terms with the Administration to get those things.”
I was astonished. “And there are statesmen in positions as high as that of a United States senator who consider that their principal business?” I asked. “Yes,” said Mr. Grund, “lots of them.” And he counted off by name a large number of senators and a much larger number of representatives, of whom he said that the distribution of the patronage, the “public plunder,” was the principal, if not the only occupation in which they took any real interest.
This was a shocking revelation to me. It was my first look into the depths of that great “American institution of government” which I subsequently learned to call by the name of “the spoils system.” That the Americans changed all the postmasters in the country with every change of party in power, I had already heard of before I came to this country, and it had struck me as something remarkably absurd. But that very nearly all the offices under the present government should treated as “public plunder,” and that statesmen who had been sent to Congress to make laws in the interest of the whole country, should spend all their time and working strength in procuring and distributing that public plunder, and that a free and intelligent people should permit this, fairly confounded my comprehension. My new friend, Mr. Francis Grund, helped me to understand it.
Mr. Grund had been for many years a newspaper correspondent in Washington. He was what would now be called the “dean” of the profession. A native of Germany, he had come to this country as a youth and had somehow soon drifted
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