to the destiny and influence of the United States with the philosophic composure of Jefferson, and the demonstrative confidence of John Adams. . . .

...

On the morning of Saturday, July second, the President was a contented and happy man - not in an ordinary degree, but joyfully, almost boyishly happy. On the way to the railroad station, to which he drove slowly, in conscious enjoyment of the beautiful morning, with an unwonted sense of leisure and a keen anticipation of pleasure, his talk was all in the grateful and gratulatory vein. He felt that after four months of trial his Administration was strong in its grasp of affairs, strong in popular favor, and destined to grow stronger; that grave difficulties confronting him at his inauguration had been safely passed; that trouble lay behind and not before him.... No foreboding of evil haunted him; no slightest premonition of danger clouded his sky. His terrible fate was upon him in an instant. One moment he stood erect, strong, confident in the years stretching out peacefully before him. The next, he lay wounded, bleeding, helpless, doomed to weary weeks of torture, to silence, and the grave.

Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world's interests, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death—and he did not quail. . . . Before him, desolation and great darkness! And his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were thrilled with instant, profound, and universal sympathy. Masterful, in his mortal weakness, he became the center of the nation's love, enshrined in the prayers of a world. But all the love and all the sympathy

1 A certain Mr. Hudson of Detroit had warned John Sherman of plans for the president-elect's assassination in November, 1880. Garfield, on hearing the warning, replied to Sherman: "I do not think there is any serious danger in the direction to which he refers, though I am receiving what I suppose to be the usual number of threatening letters on that subject. Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning, and it is best not to worry about either.”E. B. Andrews, The Last Quarter Century in the United States, Vol. I, p. 329.

could not share with him his suffering. He trod the wine-press alone. With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the divine decree.

As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the weary hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's changing wonders; on its far sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a farther shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.

merit sys

[525]

Less than a year after the assassination of President 108. The Garfield a Senate committee made the following report tem on the disgraceful condition of our civil service under the long-continued reign of the "spoils system,” which Theodore Roosevelt later declared to be "the most potent of all the forces tending to bring about the degradation of our politics." 1

The growth of our country from 350,000 square miles to 4,000,000, the increase of population from 3,000,000 to 50,000,000, the addition of twenty-five states, imperial in size and

1 Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals and Other Essays (No. VII), p. 134, reprinted from Scribner's Magazine, August, 1895.

capabilities, have caused a corresponding development of the machinery and faculties of the government. In the beginning

even so late as 1801 there were 906 post-offices; now there are 44,848. Then there were 69 custom-houses; now there are 135. Then our ministers to foreign countries were 4; now they are 33. Then our consuls were 63; now they are 728. Then less than 1000 men sufficed to administer the government; now more than 100,000 are needed. Then one man might personally know, appoint on their merits, supervise the performance of their duties, and for sufficient cause remove all officers; now no single human being, however great his intelligence, discrimination, industry, endurance, devotion, even if relieved of every other duty, can possibly, unaided, select and retain in official station those best fitted to discharge the many and varied and delicate functions of the government.

It has come to pass that the work of paying political debts and discharging political obligations, of rewarding personal friends and punishing personal foes, is the first to confront each President on assuming the duties of his office, and is ever present with him even to the last moment of his official term, giving him no rest and little time for the transaction of other business, or for the study of any higher or grander problems of statesmanship. He is compelled to give daily audience to those who personally seek place or to the army of those who back them. He is to do what some predecessor of his has left undone, or to undo what others before him have done; to put this man up and that man down, as the system of political rewards and punishments shall seem to him to demand. . . .

The office of Chief Magistrate has undergone in practice a radical change. The President of the Republic created by the Constitution in the beginning, and the Chief Magistrate of today, are two entirely different public functionaries. There has grown up such a perversion of the duties of that high office, such a prostitution of it to ends unworthy of the great idea of its creation, imposing burdens so grievous, and so degrading of all the faculties and functions becoming its occupant, that a change has already come in the character of the government itself, which, if not corrected, will be permanent and disastrous.

Thus hampered and beset, the Chief Magistrate of this nation wears out his term and his life in the petty services of party, and in the bestowal of the favors its ascendency commands. He gives daily audience to beggars for place, and sits in judgment upon the party claims of contestants.

The Executive Mansion is besieged, if not sacked, and its corridors and chambers are crowded every day with the everchanging but never-ending throng. Every Chief Magistrate, since the evil has grown to its present proportions, has cried out for deliverance. Physical endurance, even, is taxed beyond its power. More than one President is believed to have lost his life from this cause. The spectacle exhibited of the Chief Magistrate of this great nation, feeding, like a keeper, his flock, the hungry, clamorous, crowding, jostling multitude which daily gathers around the dispenser of patronage, is humiliating to the patriotic citizen interested alone in national progress and grandeur. . . .

The malign influence of political domination in appointments to office is wide-spread, and reaches out from the President himself to all possible means of approach to the appointing power. It poisons the very air we breathe. No Congressman in accord with the dispenser of power can wholly escape it. It is ever present. When he awakes in the morning it is at his door, and when he retires at night it haunts his chamber. It goes before him, it follows after him, and it meets him on the way. It levies contributions on all the relationships of a Congressman's life, summons kinship and friendship and interest to its aid, and imposes on him a work which is never finished and from which there is no release. Time is consumed, strength is exhausted, the mind is absorbed, and the vital forces of the legislator, mental as well as physical, are spent in the neverending struggle for offices.

In his first message to Congress, December 6, 1881, President Arthur, repeating the language of his letter of acceptance of the vice presidency, urged that "original appointments should be based upon ascertained fitness," that "the term of office should be stable," and that "the

investigation of all complaints and the punishment of all official misconduct should be prompt and thorough." "1 While distrusting competitive examinations as the sole test of a candidate's fitness for office, he nevertheless promised that "if Congress should deem it advisable at the present session to establish competitive tests for admission to the service," he would give the measure his "earnest support."2 On the very same day Senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio introduced a bill for the reform of the civil service, which was finally passed through the House and signed by President Arthur in January, 1883.

Be it enacted... That the President is authorized to appoint, by and with the advice of the Senate, three persons, not more than two of whom shall be adherents of the same party, as Civil Service Commissioners, and said three commissioners shall constitute the United States Civil Service Commission. . . .

Sec. 2. That it shall be the duty of said commissioners: FIRST. To aid the President, as he may request, in preparing suitable rules for carrying this act into effect, and when said rules shall have been promulgated it shall be the duty of all officers of the United States in the departments and offices to which any such rules may relate to aid, in all proper ways, in carrying said rules . . . into effect.

SECOND. And, among other things, said rules shall provide and declare, as nearly as the conditions of good administration will warrant, as follows:

First, for open, competitive examinations for testing the fitness of applicants for the public service now classified or to be classified hereunder. . . .

Second, that all the offices, places, and employments so arranged or to be arranged in classes shall be filled by selections

1 Richardson, ed. Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. VIII,

2 Ibid. p. 63.