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Updated: June 2, 2025
Office-holding, with him, was a minor consideration. "There is no theory in the principle of responsible government more vital to its right working than that parties shall take their stand on the prominent questions of the day, and mount to office or resign it through the success or failure of principles to which they are attached.
The net result was that the number of positions in the classified service was more than doubled between 1893 and 1897, making a total of 81,889 in a service of somewhat over 200,000. By the latter year the argument against reform had largely been silenced. The dismal prediction of opponents who had feared the establishment of an office-holding aristocracy had turned out to have no foundation.
After all, this seemed to make my father a bigger man than if he had accepted it. Naturally I was asked why he had declined it. "He wouldn't take it," I replied scornfully. "Office-holding should be left to politicians."
It was probably not intended that the abolition of property qualifications should overthrow the influence of property owners, or make any radical change in the policy of the state government. It is easily seen that the removal of property qualifications for voting and office-holding has had the effect of retarding the movement toward municipal home rule.
As to office-holding, the constitutions of Missouri and Oklahoma one most conservative, the other most radical both specify that the governor and members of the legislature must be male. In South Dakota women may hold any office except as otherwise provided by the constitution. In Virginia, by the constitution, they may be notaries public.
What Northern observers mistake for the gentry of the South, when they report the participation of "leading citizens" in a lynching, is simply the office-holding and commercial bourgeoisie the offspring of the poor white trash who skulked at home during the Civil War, robbing the widows and orphans of the soldiers at the front, and so laying the foundations of the present "industrial prosperity" of the section, i.e., its conversion from a region of large landed estates and urbane life into a region of stinking factories, filthy mining and oil towns, child-killing cotton mills, vociferous chambers of commerce and other such swineries.
He fastened upon the American public service a system of appointment which turned political office into the reward of partisan service, which made it unnecessary for the public officials to be competent and impossible for them to be properly experienced, and which contributed finally to the creation of a class of office-holding politicians.
The people became more "civilised," that is, they began to dress according to the latest Parisian fashions, instead of going about in stockingless feet, wooden clogs, and shirt sleeves, acquired a taste for money-getting and office-holding; became divided into parties, and lost part of their former simplicity of manners.
Here the old system under which voting and office-holding were regarded as the exclusive right of the property-owning class has not entirely disappeared. In this as in other respects the American state has evinced a fear of municipal democracy. It is true that in the choice of public officials the principle of manhood suffrage prevails.
In all this the Governor acquitted himself with credit. That his aversion to office-holding was in some measure lessening, will appear from the following: "Being in the office of Governor for some years, I was prevented from the practice of the law, and in the meantime had been engaged in public life until it commenced to be a kind of second nature to me.
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