Everybody knows this and that it is all wrong. No one would think of proposing such a vicious system for any private business; everyone is aware that employés become more valuable with experience and training, and that the success of a business establishment depends largely upon keeping its old force in service year after year. Indeed, if justice requires rotation in the well-salaried offices, the system should be greatly extended, for after all, these political offices are not the real prize employments; they are found in the high places in banks, banking houses and great industrial and mercantile establishments. But no one suggests than in a democracy there should be rotation of private employment, that a bank cashier has had enough after two years of $20,000 a year and that a mill superintendent should retire after three years at $6,000 and be both replaced, one by a patriotic bank porter and the other by a radical travelling salesman. The service of the people is the only one that professional patriots insist upon breaking down by frequent changes in the working force; by constant disorganization.
The reason for this hard treatment of the public service seems to be that it sounds democratic and alluring to say that public office is a prize open to all. It is remarkable how willing people are to be gulled by catch phrases and sayings, like this of “rotation in office,” “government by the people,” and the like. The first Napoleon caught a lot of gudgeons by the saying that every private soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. American youths are gravely told that each of them has a chance to become president of the United States; another humbug, since about only one man out of every million can possibly reach that office, no matter what the merits or deeds of the others may be. Suppose some one opens Carnegie Hall, New York, free to all comers to hear Caruso sing at a certain day and hour; no one could say that he was excluded by the terms of the invitation; and yet the manager would know perfectly well that only three thousand could possibly be admitted, and that all who came after the first three thousand would better have stayed at home. It would sound to the thoughtless like a more generous and democratic act than the distribution of three thousand free tickets, and yet it would in reality be less so; it would indeed have somewhat the effect of a fraud on all except the first three thousand. Now something like this invitation is what is offered the American people when they are each invited, as they constantly are invited, by the politicians in their universal suffrage constitutions to come in and take a part as public officials in the government of the nation. It is in every way impossible for all of us, or for more than a very few of us to do so; and all they really can and do offer us is just what we would have under a restricted suffrage, namely leave to fight or wheedle our own way to public employment or to political influence in the face of all who are determined to forestall us, the number whereof is by these very constitutions made as numerous as possible. And the so-called democratic invention of rotation in office is just another worthless and fraudulent gift, of leave to each of us, to struggle for a paltry office in competition with every political adventurer in the community; when by the very terms of the gift, the office itself is stripped of all honor and dignity, and has attached to it the certainty that the winner is almost certain to be deprived of the employment as soon as he shall have learned to fill it with ability and credit to himself. Truly Barnum was right when he undertook to build his fortune on the theory that most people love to be humbugged.