In every precinct and ward there are persons going about lauding one party and crying down the other. They make it their business to attend to the affairs of the Nation. They call conventions, pass resolutions; they put notices in papers of the times and places of meetings; they select candidates for office, and then insist upon having them elected; they distribute papers and political documents; they crowd the mails with newspapers, platforms, resolutions, facts and figures, and with everything calculated to help their party and hurt the other. In short, they are the disturbers of the public peace. They keep the community in a perpetual excitement. In the last campaign, wherever they were was turmoil. They fired cannon, carried flags, torches and transparencies; they subsidized brass bands, and shouted and hurrahed as though the world had gone insane. They were induced to do these things by the hope of success and office. Take away this hope and there will be peace once more. This thing is unendurable. The staid, the quiet and respectable people, the moderate and conservative men who always have an idea of joining the other side just to show their candor, are heartily tired of the entire performance. These gentlemen demand a rest. They are not adventurers; they have incomes; they belong to families; they have monograms and liveries. They have succeeded, and they want quiet. Growth makes a noise; development, as they call it, is nothing but disturbance. We want stability, we want political petrifaction, and we therefore demand that these meetings shall be dismissed, that these processions shall halt, that these flags shall be furled. But these things never will be stopped until we stop paying men with office for making these disturbances. You know that it has been the habit for men elected to bestow political favors upon the men who elected them. This is a crying shame. It is a kind of bribery and corruption. Men should not work with the expectation of reward and success. The frightful consequences of rewarding one's friends cannot be contemplated by a true patriot without a shudder. Exactly the opposite course is demanded by the great principle of civil service reform. There is no patriotism in working for place, for power and success. The true lover of his country is stimulated to action by the hope of defeat, and the prospect of office for his opponent. To such an extent has the pernicious system of rewarding friends for political services gone in this country, that until very lately it was difficult for a member of the defeated party to obtain a respectable office.