The little standing army of departmental employes,--the
helpless victims of the most senseless and idiotic form of discipline
the world has known,--a discipline so made up of caprice, expediency,
cowardice, and tyranny that its reform meant revolution, not to be
tolerated by legislators and lawgivers, or a despotism in which half
a dozen accidentally-chosen men interpreted their prejudices or
preferences as being that Reform. Administration after administration
and Party after Party had persisted in their desperate attempts to fit
the youthful colonial garments, made by our Fathers after a by-gone
fashion, over the expanded limits and generous outline of a matured
nation. There were patches here and there; there were grievous rents
and holes here and there; there were ludicrous and painful exposures of
growing limbs everywhere; and the Party in Power and the Party out of
Power could do nothing but mend and patch, and revamp and cleanse and
scour, and occasionally, in the wildness of despair, suggest even the
cutting off the rebellious limbs that persisted in growing beyond the
swaddling clothes of its infancy.
Pages:
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109