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be made a public-spirited and statesmanlike party chief. It is much more probable that he will not be a party chief at all. He and his kind will have to go out of the boss-business, for, there being no more spoil to distribute, they will have nothing more to do. Nor do I think that thereby the public good will suffer any loss. Their places will be taken by men who have something valuable to say concerning the public interest and who care for it.
I do not predict that the abolition of the patronage will give us absolutely ideal parties and ideal leadership. But it will relieve our political parties of one of their most serious defects, and bring them much nearer to the standard of what they should be. Neither do I think as I have already said, that civil service reform, be it ever so thorough, will cure all the ailments of the body politic, for there are evils other than the spoils system, which seriously threaten our democratic institutions. But I do believe that civil service reform, by destroying the patronage and thus eliminating from political life one of those active elements of sordid selfishness, which divert political parties from their true functions, will render those parties much more fit to deal with other important problems, and thereby greatly facilitate their successful solution.
While not indulging in the delusion that all the difficulties and obstacles standing in our way will yield at once, or that we can clear them at one great jump, we have good reason to be encouraged in our efforts gradually to overcome them. Civil service reform is happily not a partisan affair. It is neither Republican nor Democratic in a party sense. On each side of the dividing line it has its friends as well as its adversaries. Each party has at times declared itself emphatically in its favor, and certain elements in each party have sedulously co-operated with similar elements in the other party to nullify those declarations. In spite of their incessant and wily manoeuvers we have steadily gained ground, now more slowly and then more rapidly.
The progress of our cause has sometimes received a powerful impulse from events which startled the popular conscience. We are in the presence of such an event now.
