The Dominion. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER. 25, 1911. HOW REFORMS GROW.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1295, 25 November 1911, Page 4

The Dominion. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER. 25, 1911. HOW REFORMS GROW.

Month by month the _ American newspapers and magazines bring fresh masses of. evidence that the people of the United States are carrying forward a bloodless political revolution as great in its way as the revolution in China. Until within the last few years American politics have been dominated by a theory of party government such as no other great country has ever suffered. This is the famous "spoils" system, which has manifested its working most clearly in the Civil Service of America. It really began, as Me. Bp.yce points out in his monumental work, The American Commonvealth, with a law passed in IS2O, which fixed four years a,s the term for a large number of the more important public offices and made , , those terms expire shortly after the inauguration of a President. It was not until nine years later "that this law suddenly bore its inevitable fruit. Tho new Feesidf.nt Jacksox, "penetrated by extreme theories of equality, proclaimed in his, Message that rotation in office was a principle in the Republican creed, and obeyed both his doctrines and his passions by displacing five hundred postmasters in his first year, and appointing partisans in their room." Thus the soed was sown of the baneful weed of "bossism." How that weed has dwarfing the plants of healthy patriotism and honest endeavour, is a story that all the world is familiar with. But within the last few j'cars there has been a change, a-nd a change so great that few public men, and no public man with any regard for his future, can be found willing to incur the disrepute of boing hostile to Civil Service reform. It is only one of the great reforms sweeping towards consummation in America, but it is the one of most value to students of wha,t may be called the biology of political reform in general. Some interesting new letters of General Grant published in the October number of Scribner's have enabled the friends of reform in America to give their causo another drive forward.

Grant was a plain, blunt man, with a good deal of contempt for ideas that ho did not understand and had not the time to learn to like. He had himself made some experiments towards removing the Federal Civil Service from political control, but these had either failed or had been represented to him as having failed. And in any case the idea of Jackson, that "rotation in office," the celebration of a political triumph by the dismissal of the defeated party's nominees in the public service, had como to be accepted by nearly everyone as the natural theory of government. He wrote to a friend in 1877: "The progress of Civil Service reform—a very flexible reform, or humbug, that justifies whatever a few dissatisfied politicians want—cornea by instalments. There are two humbugs which Mr. Hayes will find out —for I believe he is an honest, sincere man and patriot—one is Civil Service reform, the other reformers. That is my judgment. Let us see." Gram , lived to see how ludicrously lie was in error. In the same number of Scribncr's a well-known historical writer, in the first of two articles on President Cleveland, deals with Cleveland's relations to

(be very subject of Grant's scornful ccjcksuroness. Although Cleveland was constantly hampered by (he iron fetters of party, and frequently irritated, in his half-despair of the principle of reform that he believed in, by the few vigorous and pertinacious political reformers of his time, he yet left uha White House with tho credit of having placed over forty thousand m-Gi-o public offices beyond the reach ot the "spoils" politician. Hayes carried on the work, and Roosevelt and T.U-T have practically completed it. The success of this reform uioveir,ent_ is one that should encourage political reformers everywhere. For fifty years America had been enslaved by the barbaric idea that the spoils should rightly go to tho victors; to fight that idea was an enterprise not very much less difficult than to lift oneself by the bootstraps. Yet the reform began, grew, and has now triumphed. Tho New York Evcninr/ Post thinks that the story illustrates finely "the way in which reform makes headway against scepticism and hostility," and especially "the method by which all good causes in this world 'get forrard. , "

The now ideas (it says) at first beat upon the minds ot public men in vain. They aro thrown back like rubber balls from a stono wall. We say customarily that tho fimo was not ripe, hut we mean that men's consciences wcto uot sensitive nor their intellects open. Lincoln was what wo should now call ,i spoils President, mainly because tho very conception of. any other political method had not risen above his horizon. We can see- now that Grant, though some reformers urged his election on the ground that a plain and honest man like nim, who was nlso a rigid disciplinarian, would cast aside the rubbishy spoilsmen, was really hopeless in such matters. They had no appeal to his nature or to the men about him. Tet that was no reason for tho champions of tho reform to tease working and arguing. It was because they kept on crying out and sparing. not that in time the needed atmosphere was created in which tho new ideas could thrive.

Political reform always has to go through the regular stages through which innovation must almost always pass. [Some innovations are sprung suddenly upon a nation, without discussion in any historical sense, and arc sooner _or later painfully discarded.] Not everything, of course, that begins with unpopularity is true reform. But, as the New York paper points out, "any party or group or individual that has hold of a vital and germinating principle of political progress may well.take heart of hope from the history of Civil Service reform in America, and press on with the confidence of a Gladstone that, whatever may he the temporary ebbing, in the end the flowing tide will be on the right side." Long-established abuses of administration can count for defence always upon a force which for fierccncsa and bitterness easily transcends any force that works for reform—namely, the instinct for self-preservation in the beneficiaries of the abuses, lint tho conditions of national life set a limit to the number of these beneficiaries, and the upholders of a "spoils" system sooner or later lose their grip of things, while the idea of reform is constantly gathering about it a growing army. It has been found again and again in history that a point is always reached in the fight for political reform at which the natural instinct for righteousness in a civilised society breaks the bonds of custom and even of self-interest.