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the merit of furnishing a most striking demonstration of the inherent absurdity and viciousness of the four-years rule itself by this very observance of it.
The same may be said of the application of that rule by the Postmaster-General to the fourth-class postmasters. But the result of this proceeding, if further adhered to, will after all be to put, before the close of the Presidential term, all the offices concerned into the hands of the party in power, and to leave so far to the service an essentially partisan character. It will have been a clean sweep—shamefaced and executed with evidences of a troubled conscience, but for all that a provocation to the party next coming into power to respond with another clean sweep in the opposite interest, and so on, ad infinitum, until we get a President who immortalizes himself by boldly breaking the vicious succession. We certainly do not fail to appreciate the fact that the President as well as the Postmaster-General, by doing as much as they did, have incurred the bitter hostility of the disappointed spoils-seekers and their friends. But that hostility would hardly have been more bitter or dangerous had the disappointment been greater. At the same cost of popularity and the same peril, the President and the Postmaster-General might have gone one step farther in order to leave to their successors as a great example and precedent a service not strictly partisan and not provoking another clean sweep as a retaliatory measure. But the end of this Administration is not yet, and there are reasons for hoping that its second half will be the most productive of good.
As to the observance of the Civil Service Law in the several Departments of the national Government, the Treasury Department under Mr. Carlisle has, I regret to say, won an unenviable distinction. Beginning with an act of gross nepotism, his management has not only furnished the strongest proof of the necessity of putting the chiefs of division under the Civil Service Rules, so as to protect those places, in the manifest interest of the service, against the encroachments of spoils politics, but in the matter of removals, reductions and promo-
