On March 4, 1885, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the first Democrat elected President since James Buchanan. His Cabinet was necessarily filled with men inexperienced in national administration, for the party had been proscribed for six terms. The greatest attention was attracted by the two former Confederates, Garland and Lamar, whose career did much to disprove the "gloomy and baseless superstition" of twenty years, "that one half of the nation had become the irreconcilable enemies of the national unity and the national will." It was an American Administration, and of its chief, James Russell Lowell, who had known men in many lands, wrote, "He is a truly American type of the best kind--a type very dear to me, I confess." The State Department was entrusted to Thomas F. Bayard, who had been a competitor for the nomination in 1884, and who sustained the tradition that only first-rate men shall fill this office. Bayard proceeded at once to undo the work of the last five years and to reverse a policy of Blaine. A treaty with Nicaragua, negotiated by Frelinghuysen in December, 1884, ran counter to the English treaty of 1850. After a vain attempt to persuade Great Britain to abandon the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty respecting an isthmian canal, Frelinghuysen had disregarded it and acquired a complete right-of-way from Nicaragua. This was pending in the Senate when Cleveland was inaugurated, and was withdrawn at once. The United States reverted to the old Whig policy of a neutralized canal. In all departments the new Administration was forced to test the strength of its convictions upon civil service reform. During its long years of opposition the party had often voiced a demand for reform, but now in office its workers demanded the usual rewards of success. Cleveland had fought the spoils politicians in New York, and had taken counsel of Carl Schurz after his election as President. In the next four years he nearly doubled the number in the classified service in the face of opposition from his most intimate associates. The problems of prosperity and national growth, developing in the eighties and culminating between 1885 and 1889, involved administrative efficiency rather than party policy. On every side the Government was forced to expand its activities, and Cleveland was occupied in getting new machinery into operation and meeting conditions for which no precedents existed.