It is born of the same civic immorality as the manhood suffrage doctrine, and is an incident or offshoot of the vicious theory that the vote is a natural right or privilege of the citizen. The manhood suffrage claim is that the vote is for the benefit of the voter; the rotation doctrine is that the office exists for the advantage of the office holder. The two claims are related. On the one hand if the vote be regarded as a function to be exercised only by the capable, then it is easy and natural to insist upon proper qualifications for public office holders and for permanency in office for the qualified; on the other hand, if the citizen, as such, has an absolute right to vote, why not to hold office? The analogy between a voter and an office holder is not perfect, but it has often been found in practice sufficient to satisfy the popular mind, unaccustomed to disinterested reflections. You may say that the fact that a man is allowed to vote is no reason why he should be permitted to hold office, and business men or men of property will agree with you, for they are not easily tempted to seek public employment. Not so, however, your voter who has neither property nor settled income, nor business capacity sufficient to acquire either. His education often early tends towards office seeking; he is strongly advised by the newspapers and by twaddlers generally, to take part in the primaries, to become active in politics; and if he does so, he soon learns just how the thing is done. Why may not he then have a turn at the trough as well as another? The politicians encourage this attitude. They are of course strongly in favor of rotation in office as a system which is in every way capable of use to the advantage of machine politics. It accomplishes two things for them; it creates office vacancies, and it dispenses with merit in filling them, leaving them absolutely at the disposition of the machine to reward party services. The politicians therefore are able and willing to persuade the uneducated voters of the virtue of office rotation. Nor could they well openly condemn it. You cannot admit the shiftless and ignorant into the electorate, and then systematically spurn the ideas and claims which are natural and appropriate to them as a class. One of these ideas is, that one who has held any office a couple of years has had a fair share, and ought to be satisfied to give way to someone else; and that if he insists on coming up for re-election no matter how competent he may be, he should be “knifed” as they say. And so we have in this country to a mischievous extent the doctrine and system of rotation in office as one of the troublesome and vicious incidents and results of manhood suffrage.