Once again, a little later than this, he was called on to preside at a dinner of the Civil Service Reform Association, and something of what he then said may be quoted as showing how hope and courage came to the front with him when great national issues were in question. “If I am sometimes inclined to fancy,” he then said, “as old men will, that the world I see about me is not so pleasant as that on which my eyes first opened, yet I am bound to admit on cross-examining myself, that it is on the whole a better world, better especially in the wider distribution of the civilized and civilizing elements which compose it, better for the increased demands made upon it by those who were once dumb and helpless and for their increasing power to enforce those demands. But every advance in the right direction which I have witnessed has seemed painfully slow. And painfully slow it was, if measured, as we are apt to measure, by the standard of our own little lives, and not, as we should, by that larger life of the community which can afford to wait. “Every reform like that in which we are interested has to contend with vested interests, and of all vested interests abuses are those which are most adroit in putting a specious gloss on their monopolies and most unscrupulous as to the weapons to be used in their defence. The evil system which we would fain replace with a better has gone on so long that it almost seems part of the order of nature. It is a barbarous and dangerous system. When I was in Spain I saw reason to think that the decay of that noble nation, due, no doubt, to many causes, was due above all to a Civil Service like our own that had gone farther on the inevitable road which ours is going. “It should seem that a reform like ours, so reasonable, so convenient, so economical, would at once commend itself to the good sense of the people. And I think there are manifest signs that it is more and more so commending itself. The humanity of our day is willing (as our ancestors were not) that the state should support its inefficient members. But did humorist ever conceive a more wasteful way of supporting them than by paying them salaries for performing ill the minor and more mechanical functions of government, thus making this inefficiency costly to every one of us in his daily affairs? Even supposing them capable of becoming efficient, the chances are that, just when they have learned their business, they will be dismissed to make room for other apprentices to pass through the same routine. My own experience has convinced me that not only our social credit, but our business interests have suffered greatly by the theory still more or less prevalent that a man good for nothing else was just the thing for one of the smaller foreign consulates.” CHAPTER XVII THE LAST YEARS 1888-1891