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-But always he stopped most reverently
At the last description of the three,
Not telling his vision openly.

Constantia often longed, in vain,
To cause the Bishop to be more plain;
And finally, after years of thought,
Grew wholly bent upon what she sought.
The Christ of Calvary, raised on high,
Ascending never again to die,

Had left behind Him this holy trace,
This one true likeness, this perfect face:
And if, by means which were still untried,
She too might see it before she died,
This would repay her waiting years,
Her faithful vigils, and prayerful tears.
To Nicomedia then she went
On such an errand of pure intent;
But, finding Eusebius far from thence,
Active in all benevolence,

And busied with matters of the Church,
She wrote him letters about her search:
"Where could this face of Christ be found?
In what abode of the region round?
Who was its guardian? Who possessed
This treasure rarer than all the rest?
Where was its crypt, or cave, or chest?
Let him send it, that she might view
That very Christ the apostles knew ! "

Again and again did words like these

Follow him over his diocese,

Until, as she would not be denied,

The bishop Eusebius replied:

"You wish," he writes, "that myself should send

The image of Christ, to you, my friend;

But tell me fairly and candidly,

What do you think that this may be?

Is it that one unchanged and true

Which has no age, and is ever new,
Which bore our nature, yet kept its own,
And which is the right of God alone?
With this I trust you are not concerned,
Since you, from the Scriptures having learned,
Cannot mistake the Apostle's speech,
'That none may ever the knowledge reach
Of God the Father, save God the Son;

Nor can there be found a single one

To know the Son, save the Father only.'

In short, that here is an image lonely

Which none may touch and which none attain
So long as sin and ourselves remain.

"Nor do I think that image meant

When God and man, in one person blent,

Trod the stained earth with His sinless feet;

Felt in His bosom our sorrows beat;

Bore in Himself our human fears;

Wept over us such Godlike tears;

Died for our sake such a human death;

Rose for our sake with such Godlike breath ;

That truly these are so woven in,

The sinful with that which cannot sin,

The human with that which is all divine,

As no mere mortal can well define.

"Who, therefore, by colors so dead and cold,
Can show the splendor which shone of old,
Can paint the God and the Man-that face
In its mortal, and yet immortal grace ?
Who, by a picture transitory,

Can tell one half of the holy story?
For they who loved Him the first and chief,
Who held to Him with the best belief;
When on the mountain, apart from men,
Saw him too wondrous for tongue or pen;
And, falling prone at the awful sight,
Could not endure so great a light!

"If, then, His figure, when here on earth,
Received such power from His sacred birth;
If this dear Saviour could not be known
When here, apart from the Father's throne-
What must it be, when now He reigns
Above the torment of human pains?
No painted image can reach Him there-
No artist's pencil His face declare.

"I do not send you the likeness, then.
Far better than this may be yours; for when
You search your heart as you search the land,
And plan with zeal as you now have planned;
When thought goes out to all holy things;

When your soul has eyes and your prayers have wings;
When the hardest toil of our common lot
Becomes transformed, and its pain is not;
When penitence for the sinful life

Wields the armor for nobler strife-
Then, at last, you are near your goal,
For the face of the Lord is upon your soul,
And faith, in your faithful life, can see
The image of Christ of Calvary."

And here Baronius turns the page
And adds long records of saint and sage;
The old black-letter runs on again,
Like a turbid stream after summer-rain.
But I close the book, for its tale is told-
That story new, though it seemeth old.
And I sit in silence, since here indeed
The dead have written for me to read.

OUR CIVIL SERVICE.

THERE are many weighty problems before the country in connection with the reconstruction and the regeneration of the Southern States, and with financial and fiscal affairs; but these, and other questions, are all subordinate in importance to that relating to the organization of the civil service of the United States.

At present there is no organization save that of corruption; no system save that of chaos; no test of integrity save that of partisanship; no test of qualification save that of intrigue.

The consequence is, that the revenue laws are not executed, for the want of faithful officers; and these and other laws are imperfectly applied, for the want of competent functionaries.

In local, general, and Presidential elections, the whole country is thrown into convulsions; and who would imagine that these demonstrations of public liberty are converted into engines of public demoralization? But in the present chaos of the civil service it is so. Every man elected to State or national, executive or legislative positions, promises offices to a number of citizens who vote for him, and the great majority of the hundreds of thousands of officeholders of the United States are virtually nothing else than political mercenaries, who are paid by the state, instead of being paid by the individual whom their votes lift into power.

If one hundred thousand mercenaries were actually paid in cash by the state at the average rate of two thousand dollars, the country would know that it is bled annually to the extent of two hundred million dollars; and resign itself by adding this amount to the general cost of representative government; and Congressmen and Customhouse Directors, and members of the

Cabinet, and other legislative and executive authorities might rise at least in public estimation in proportion to the additional prize-money exacted from the country for their retainers.

But these satellites of the executive and legislative planets are not only paid by the state, instead of being paid by the luminaries around whom they revolve, but they rob the state; they mismanage public business, and bring free institutions into disrepute by proclaiming to the world that representative government can only be maintained by subsidizing organized bands of mercenary office-holders, and by securing the boon of political liberty at the cost of morality and of the culture and attainments requisite for the public service.

If republican institutions cannot be maintained except by holding out bribes to voters, it would at all events be more economical and respectable for the United States Government to make a bargain with each person elected to legislative and executive offices, paying him a certain amount for his expenses at the poll or in the State legislatures, and reserving to itself the power of appointing public officers who have undergone examinations and passed the tests prescribed by Mr. Jenckes's Civil Service bill. But to pay the gentlemen who help the honorable Representatives from the different States to their respective seats, or eminent politicians to secretaryships, collectorships, and foreign missions, by conferring upon them public offices, allotted geographically or indiscriminately, and then to incur the risk of their robberies, blunders, and mismanagements of every kind, is not only intolerable upon the score of total depravity, but also upon that of total stupidity, and one of two things is sure

to happen: either the Republic must break up this systematized demoralization, or it will break up the Republic.

As long as this demoralization lasts, the Republic will be so only in name. In fact, it will be a species of crapulous, democratic imperialism, which ransacks the gutters of the land for the purpose of enlisting mercenaries, who, in reward for their services, prop up the Presidential throne and the legislative pillars, and then, with the true instinct of freebooters recruited under the piratical banner that to the "victors belong the spoils," rob and disgrace a nation which is foolish enough to believe that liberty can thrive when its standard-bearers are reeking with ignorance and venality.

Foreign nations need not be startled by this frank statement of ugly facts. If they had not introduced African slavery into the North American continent, and if they had not fastened upon this country the noble but irksome task of educating into manhood and freedom European paupers and the children of these paupers, the American people might have found leisure and opportunity to devise measures for purging their public service from ignorance and corruption, and for making the tests of moral and mental qualification more stringent in proportion to the increase of population and territory, and the corresponding increase of public offi

cers.

But as it was, we had no breathingtime. Slavery stared us in the face at the very dawn of our national existence. The slavery question so distracted the country, that even those who were appalled by the growing demoralization of the public service shrank from laying hands upon the monster, because it was overshadowed by the still greater monster, slavery.

It may be asserted that, during the war of independence, the curses against slavery were hushed by the necessity of unanimity in throwing off the British yoke, and that, since the achievement of our independence, the painful feeling

inspired by the traffic in public offices was quelled by the greater indignation aroused by the supremacy of the slave oligarchy.

That the traffic in public offices became the most formidable auxiliary of this supremacy, and that the most unenlightened elements of the European importations of population were controlled by it, almost despotically, require no demonstration at our hands. The facts are matter of history. The politicians of the Tory and slavery school would never have had such a long lease of power, if they had not been able to hold out the bait of office to their most unscrupulous camp-followers. To talk to them of a reform in the civil service, would have been regarded as stark insanity: they would have scouted the idea of dispelling a chaos that fostered their designs, and of introducing a system of culture and integrity which would have blasted their hopes.

Conscious as every thoughtful citizen was of the abuses of political life, he was equally conscious of the futility of attempting to reform any of its branches as long as the fountain head of political liberty and morals was poisoned by the abettors of the slavery power.

While the country was struggling against the progress of slavery, it was at the same time engaged in the civilization of its new territories, and in the education of its new European streams of population. To have converted the American wildernesses into prosperous cities, and marshalled gigantic armies for the overthrow of the old Tory and slave power, and at the same time kept our civil service and political machinery free from those abuses, which had such an immense scope, we would have been superhuman.

We have been only human and could not carry out a series of vast transformations and reforms at one and the same time.

It is because we have accomplished such great deeds within a few generations, that we can afford to lay bare the

evils which still gnaw the heart-life of the Republic. Weak nations may feel constrained to gloss over the defects of their systems of administration, but strong nations need not stoop to concealment of national blemishes. In our case, frankness is a token of power. It is, moreover, a great relief to follow the practice of the English race, in calling things by their names, and in taking the bull by the horn. We have, therefore, not scrupled to present the darkest aspect of our political spoiltraffic theories. But having said thus much, we have to put in what French lawyers would call pleas of extenuation. They consist in this: that in our country but few, if any, persons can afford or are inclined to work for nothing. Hence, if Jones works for the election of Brown, Jones expects to be compensated in some way or other. Not only that Jones must live, and that Mrs. and the Misses Jones must be able to make a decent figure in society, but Jones is also imbued with a certain rough sense of dignity. Self-sacrifice being superseded, in the current of modern ethics, by self-elevation, Jones claims his reward not only as due to Jones in the concrete, but also to Jones in the abstract; to the man as well as to the citizen; to his individual wants as well as to his civic claims. In mediæval times Jones would have got his pay, and there would have been an end of Jones. But at the present day Jones claims that his emotions as well as his pockets are involved in the transaction. He sympathizes with the political church of Brown, and, long after having received his compensation in the shape of a postmastership, or a clerkship in the Treasury or the Customhouse, or an assessorship, he uses his influence, whatever that may be, in the interest of the common political church. Brown has to sustain him accordingly, and to vote for an increase of his salary, and even to oppose the reform in the office in which Jones is employed, in the event of such reform threatening to submerge Jones. Jones may steal; he may blunder; when appointed to a

postmastership, he may desert his post and saddle upon the country the additional expense of sustaining Jones's shadow or deputy; when in the Treasury, he may connect himself with rings, and betray the secrets of his office; he may commit all sort and manner of irregularities and delinquencies, but as long as he clings to the political church, there is a chance at least of political salvation, and in most cases also of escape from justice, and of shelter against exposure and removal. Or, without being positively criminal and unfaithful, he may be altogether incompetent for the discharge of his duties, or revel in sinecures, as thousands of Joneses do all over the country, and in foreign offices; but he adheres to the tenets of the political church, and Brown, his high priest, bestows upon him absolution for all his sins.

Now, what the Browns fear in voting for the adoption of the Jenckes Civil Service Bill, which provides for tests of examination and qualification, so as to purge the service from all incompetent and dishonest persons, is that they will be lost by losing the support of the Joneses.

And here we are at issue with the Browns. We contend that there are all kind and manner of Joneses. There are incompetent, dishonest Joneses, and there are well-qualified and perfectly honest Joneses. All Brown has to do, is to shift his base. He must turn his back upon rascals and loafers and ignoramuses, or resign himself to private life, if he cannot select his sponsors for his public life from the honorable and able members of the community in the midst of which he lives. Brown may promise to give to Jones the benefit of his patronage, provided that Jones possesses the requisite moral and intellectual qualifications for the office to which he aspires. The Jenckes bill does not do away with political patronage. It only makes it subject to certain conditions of fitness, which are of greater importance to the state than the rise of Brown or the fall of Jones, and

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