sternation. “Among the official corps here,” wrote Clay on March 12, the day before his departure from Washington, “there is the greatest solicitude and apprehension. The members of it feel something like the inhabitants of Cairo when the plague breaks out: no one knows who is next to encounter the stroke of death, or, which with many of them is the same thing, to be dismissed from office. You have no conception of the moral tyranny which prevails here over those in employment.” Bad as this appeared, it was not the worst of it. The “spoils system,” full fledged, had taken possession of the national government, and, as we shall see, its most baneful effects were soon to appear.
Clay foresaw the consequences clearly, and, at a great public feast given to him by his neighbors upon his arrival at his home, he promptly raised his voice against the noxious innovation. This principle he laid down as his starting-point: “Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.” In solemn words of prophecy he painted the effects which the systematic violation of this principle, inaugurated by Jackson, must inevitably bring about: political contests turned into scrambles for plunder; a “system of universal rapacity” substituted for a system of responsibility; favoritism for fitness; “Congress corrupted, the press corrupted, general corruption; until, the sub-
