Volume IV Part 13 (1/2)
Everybody admits that the value of all other things is regulated by the play against each other of the forces of supply and demand. No reason has been or can be given why the value of the unit of money is not subject to this law.
The demand for money is equivalent to the sum of the demands for all other things whatsoever, for it is through a demand first made on money that all the wants of man are satisfied. The demand for money is instant, constant, and unceasing, and is always at a maximum. If any man wants a pair of shoes, or a suit of clothes, he does not make his demand first on the shoemaker, or clothier. No man, except a beggar, makes a demand directly for food, clothes, or any other article. Whether it be to obtain clothing, food, or shelter--whether the simplest necessity or the greatest luxury of life--it is on money that the demand is first made. As this rule operates throughout the entire range of commodities it is manifest that the demand for money equals at least the united demands for all other things.
While population remains stationary, the demand for money will remain the same. As the demand for one article becomes less, the demand for some other which shall take its place becomes greater. The demand for money, therefore, must ever be as pressing and urgent as the needs of man are varied, incessant, and importunate.
Such being the demand for money, what is the supply? It is the total number of units of money in circulation (actual or potential) in any country.
The force of the demand for money operating against the supply is represented by the earnest, incessant struggle to obtain it. All men, in all trades and occupations, are offering either property or services for money. Each shoemaker in each locality is in compet.i.tion with every other shoemaker in the same locality, each hatter is in compet.i.tion with every other hatter, each clothier with every other clothier, all offering their wares for units of money. In this universal and perpetual compet.i.tion for money, that number of shoemakers that can supply the demand for shoes at the smallest average price (excellence of quality being taken into account) will fix the market value of shoes in money; and conversely, will fix the value of money in shoes. So with the hatters as to hats, so with the tailors as to clothes, and so with those engaged in all other occupations as to the products respectively of their labor.
The transcendent importance of money, and the constant pressure of the demand for it, may be realized by comparing its utility with that of any other force that contributes to human welfare.
In all the broad range of articles that in a state of civilization are needed by man, the only absolutely indispensable thing is money. For everything else there is some subst.i.tute--some alternative; for money there is none. Among articles of food, if beef rises in price, the demand for it will diminish, as a certain proportion of the people will resort to other forms of food. If, by reason of its continued scarcity, beef continues to rise, the demand will further diminish, until finally it may altogether cease and centre on something else. So in the matter of clothing. If any one fabric becomes scarce, and consequently dear, the demand will diminish, and, if the price continue rising, it is only a question of time for the demand to cease and be transferred to some alternative.
But this cannot be the case with money. It can never be driven out of use. There is not, and there never can be, any subst.i.tute for it. It may become so scarce that one dollar at the end of a decade may buy ten times as much as at the beginning; that is to say, it may cost in labor or commodities ten times as much to get it, but at whatever cost, the people must have it. Without money the demands of civilization could not be supplied.
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS,
OF NEW YORK (BORN 1824, DIED 1892.)
ON THE SPOILS SYSTEM AND THE PROGRESS OF CIVIL SERVICE REFORM.
An Address delivered before the American Social Science a.s.sociation at its Meeting in Saratoga, New York, September 8, 1881.
Twelve years ago I read a paper before this a.s.sociation upon reform in the Civil Service. The subject was of very little interest. A few newspapers which were thought to be visionary occasionally discussed it, but the press of both parties smiled with profound indifference.
Mr. Jenckes had pressed it upon an utterly listless Congress, and his proposition was regarded as the harmless hobby of an amiable man, from which a little knowledge of practical politics would soon dismount him.
The English reform, which was by far the most significant political event in that country since the parliamentary reform bill of 1832, was virtually unknown to us. To the general public it was necessary to explain what the Civil Service was, how it was recruited, what the abuses were, and how and why they were to be remedied. Old professional politicians, who look upon reform as Dr. Johnson defined patriotism, as the last refuge of a scoundrel, either laughed at what they called the politics of idiocy and the moon, or sneered bitterly that reformers were cheap hypocrites who wanted other people's places and lamented other people's sins.
This general public indifference was not surprising. The great reaction of feeling which followed the war, the relaxation of the long-strained anxiety of the nation for its own existence, the exhaustion of the vast expenditure of life and money, and the satisfaction with the general success, had left little disposition to do anything but secure in the national polity the legitimate results of the great contest. To the country, reform was a proposition to reform evils of administration of which it knew little, and which, at most, seemed to it petty and impertinent in the midst of great affairs. To Congress, it was apparently a proposal to deprive members of the patronage which to many of them was the real gratification of their position, the only way in which they felt their distinction and power. To such members reform was a plot to deprive the bear of his honey, the dog of his bone, and they stared and growled incredulously.
This was a dozen years ago. To-day the demand for reform is imperative.
The drop has become a deluge. Leading journals of both parties eagerly proclaim its urgent necessity. From New England to California public opinion is organizing itself in reform a.s.sociations. In the great custom-house and the great post-office of the country--those in the city of New York--reform has been actually begun upon definite principles and with remarkable success, and the good example has been followed elsewhere with the same results. A bill carefully prepared and providing for gradual and thorough reform has been introduced with an admirable report in the Senate of the United States. Mr. Pendleton, the Democratic Senator from Ohio, declares that the Spoils System which has debauched the Civil Service of fifty millions of people must be destroyed. Mr.
Dawes, the Republican Senator from Ma.s.sachusetts, summons all good citizens to unite to suppress this gigantic evil which threatens the republic. Conspicuous reformers sit in the Cabinet; and in this sorrowful moment, at least, the national heart and mind and conscience, stricken and bowed by a calamity whose pathos penetrates every house-hold in Christendom, cries to these warning words, ”Amen! Amen!”
Like the slight sound amid the frozen silence of the Alps that loosens and brings down the avalanche, the solitary pistol-shot of the 2d of July has suddenly startled this vast acc.u.mulation of public opinion into conviction, and on every side thunders the rush and roar of its overwhelming descent, which will sweep away the host of evils bred of this monstrous abuse.
This is an extraordinary change for twelve years, but it shows the vigorous political health, the alert common-sense, and the essential patriotism of the country, which are the earnest of the success of any wise reform. The war which naturally produced the la.s.situde and indifference to the subject which were evident twelve years ago had made reform, indeed, a vital necessity, but the necessity was not then perceived. The dangers that attend a vast system of administration based to its least detail upon personal patronage were not first exposed by Mr. Jenckes in 1867, but before that time they had been mainly discussed as possibilities and inferences. Yet the history of the old New York council of appointment had ill.u.s.trated in that State the party fury and corruption which patronage necessarily breeds, and Governor McKean in Pennsylvania, at the close of the last century, had made ”a clean sweep”
of the places within his power. The spoils spirit struggled desperately to obtain possession of the national administration from the day of Jefferson's inauguration to that of Jackson's, when it succeeded.
Its first great but undesigned triumph was the decision of the First Congress in 1789, vesting the sole power of removal in the President, a decision which placed almost every position in the Civil Service unconditionally at his pleasure. This decision was determined by the weight of Madison's authority. But Webster, nearly fifty years afterwards, opposing his authority to that of Madison, while admitting the decision to have been final, declared it to have been wrong. The year 1820, which saw the great victory of slavery in the Missouri Compromise, was also the year in which the second great triumph of the spoils system was gained, by the pa.s.sage of the law which, under the plea of securing greater responsibility in certain financial offices, limited such offices to a term of four years. The decision of 1789, which gave the sole power of removal to the President, required positive executive action to effect removal; but this law of 1820 vacated all the chief financial offices, with all the places dependent upon them, during the term of every President, who, without an order of removal, could fill them all at his pleasure.
A little later a change in the method of nominating the President from a congressional caucus to a national convention still further developed the power of patronage as a party resource, and in the session of 1825-26, when John Quincy Adams was President, Mr. Benton introduced his report upon Mr. Macon's resolution declaring the necessity of reducing and regulating executive patronage; although Mr. Adams, the last of the Revolutionary line of Presidents, so scorned to misuse patronage that he leaned backward in standing erect. The pressure for the overthrow of the const.i.tutional system had grown steadily more angry and peremptory with the progress of the country, the development of party spirit, the increase of patronage, the unantic.i.p.ated consequences of the sole executive power of removal, and the immense opportunity offered by the four-years' law. It was a pressure against which Jefferson held the gates by main force, which was relaxed by the war under Madison and the fusion of parties under Monroe, but which swelled again into a furious torrent as the later parties took form. John Quincy Adams adhered, with the tough tenacity of his father's son, to the best principles of all his predecessors. He followed Was.h.i.+ngton, and observed the spirit of the Const.i.tution in refusing to remove for any reason but official misconduct or incapacity. But he knew well what was coming, and with characteristically stinging sarcasm he called General Jackson's inaugural address ”a threat of re-form.” With Jackson's administration in 1830 the deluge of the spoils system burst over our national politics. Sixteen years later, Mr. Buchanan said in a public speech that General Taylor would be faithless to the Whig party if he did not proscribe Democrats. So high the deluge had risen which has ravaged and wasted our politics ever since, and the danger will be stayed only when every President, leaning upon the law, shall stand fast where John Quincy Adams stood.
But the debate continued during the whole Jackson administration. In the Senate and on the stump, in elaborate reports and popular speeches, Webster, Calhoun, and Clay, the great political chiefs of their time, sought to alarm the country with the dangers of patronage. Sargent S.
Prentiss, in the House of Representatives, caught up and echoed the cry under the administration of Van Buren. But the country refused to be alarmed. As the Yankee said of the Americans at the battle of White Plains, where they were beaten, ”The fact is, as far as I can understand, our folks did n't seem to take no sort of interest in that battle.” The reason that the country took no sort of interest in the discussion of the evils of patronage was evident. It believed the denunciation to be a mere party cry, a scream of disappointment and impotence from those who held no places and controlled no patronage.
It heard the leaders of the opposition fiercely arraigning the administration for proscription and universal wrong-doing, but it was accustomed by its English tradition and descent always to hear the Tories cry that the Const.i.tution was in danger when the Whigs were in power, and the Whigs under a Tory administration to shout that all was lost. It heard the uproar like the old lady upon her first railroad journey, who sat serene amid the wreck of a collision, and when asked if she was much hurt, looked over her spectacles and answered, blandly, ”Hurt? Why, I supposed they always stopped so in this kind of travelling.” The feeling that the denunciation was only a part of the game of politics, and no more to be accepted as a true statement than Snug the joiner as a true lion, was confirmed by the fact that when the Whig opposition came into power with President Harrison, it adopted the very policy which under Democratic administration it had strenuously denounced as fatal. The pressure for place was even greater than it had been ten years before, and although Mr. Webster as Secretary of State maintained his consistency by putting his name to an executive order a.s.serting sound principles, the order was swept away like a lamb by a locomotive.
Nothing but a miracle, said General Harrison's attorney-general, can feed the swarm of hungry office-seekers.
Adopted by both parties, Mr. Marcy's doctrine that the places in the public service are the proper spoils of a victorious party, was accepted as a necessary condition of popular government. One of the highest officers of the government expounded this doctrine to me long afterwards. ”I believe,” said he, ”that when the people vote to change a party administration they vote to change every person of the opposite party who holds a place, from the President of the United States to the messenger at my door.” It is this extraordinary but sincere misconception of the function of party in a free government that leads to the serious defence of the spoils system. Now, a party is merely a voluntary a.s.sociation of citizens to secure the enforcement of a certain policy of administration upon which they are agreed. In a free government this is done by the election of legislators and of certain executive officers who are friendly to that policy. But the duty of the great body of persons employed in the minor administrative places is in no sense political. It is wholly ministerial, and the political opinions of such persons affect the discharge of their duties no more than their religious views or their literary preferences. All that can be justly required of such persons, in the interest of the public business, is honesty, intelligence, capacity, industry, and due subordination; and to say that, when the policy of the Government is changed by the result of an election from protection to free-trade, every book-keeper and letter-carrier and messenger and porter in the public offices ought to be a free-trader, is as wise as to say that if a merchant is a Baptist every clerk in his office ought to be a believer in total immersion. But the officer of whom I spoke undoubtedly expressed the general feeling.