The root of the complex evil, then, is personal favoritism. This produces congressional dictation, senatorial usurpation, arbitrary removals, interference in elections, political assessments, and all the consequent corruption, degradation, and danger that experience has disclosed. The method of reform, therefore, must be a plan of selection for appointment which makes favoritism impossible. The general feeling undoubtedly is that this can be accomplished by a fixed limited term. But the terms of most of the offices to which the President and the Senate appoint, and upon which the myriad minor places in the service depend, have been fixed and limited for sixty years, yet it is during that very period that the chief evils of personal patronage have appeared. The law of 1820, which limited the term of important revenue offices to four years, and which was afterwards extended to other offices, was intended, as John Quincy Adams tells us, to promote the election to the presidency of Mr. Crawford, who was then Secretary of the Treasury. The law was drawn by Mr. Crawford himself, and it was introduced into the Senate by one of his devoted partisans. It placed the whole body of executive financial officers at the mercy of the Secretary of the Treasury and of a majority of the Senate, and its design, as Mr. Adams says, "was to secure for Mr. Crawford the influence of all the incumbents in office, at the peril of displacement, and of five or ten times an equal number of ravenous office-seekers, eager to supplant them." This is the very substance of the Spoils System, intentionally introduced by a fixed limitation of term in place of the constitutional tenure of efficient service; and it was so far successful that it made the custom-house officers, district attorneys, marshals, registers of the land-office, receivers of public money, and even paymasters in the army, notoriously active partisans of Mr. Crawford. Mr. Benton says that the four-years' law merely made the dismissal of faithful officers easier, because the expiration of the term was regarded as "the creation of a vacancy to be filled by new appointments." A fixed limited term for the chief offices has not destroyed or modified personal influence, but, on the contrary, it has fostered universal servility and loss of self-respect, because reappointment depends, not upon official fidelity and efficiency, but upon personal influence and favor. To fix by law the terms of places dependent upon such offices would be like an attempt to cure hydrophobia by the bite of a mad dog. The incumbent would be always busy keeping his influence in repair to secure reappointment, and the applicant would be equally busy in seeking such influence to procure the place, and as the fixed terms would be constantly expiring, the eager and angry intrigue and contest of influence would be as endless as it is now. This certainly would not be reform.