(MR. HAYES GOES OUT)
"A rough Republican wit remarked, the other day, that 'Mr. Hayes
came in by a majority of one and goes out by unanimous consent.'
"We are not certain that this is quite accurate. A good many people
will remember that Mr. Hayes gave the country peace and rest for
four years, and that, while he did not make the unimpeachably
'clean' administration of which some of his favorites boast, and
did continually, and as may be justly said, brazenly violate his
repeated pledges for civil service reform, he managed to avoid great
scandals. Most of his Southern appointments were disgraceful; they
were worse even, for they did great harm, and there is no denying
the truth of the accusation that he put, or kept, corrupt and base
men in office--not a few, but dozens upon dozens--to reward them
for political and personal services of a kind which no decent
public man would recognize. But he passed two or three years in
the White House in constant terror of threatened disclosures which
would compel him to leave the Presidency a disgraced man, and he
probably regarded the improper appointments he made as necessary in
self-defence.
"The very general contempt and dislike of Mr. Hayes, felt and openly
expressed by public men of both parties, rests, we believe, on a
sound basis. That he took the Presidency, knowing he was not elected
to it, forms but the smaller part of the ground for this feeling;
for, after all, he took it on the decision of a high court of
arbitration which was final. His real offence is that he took office
at the hands of his party, having carefully deceived it up to the
last moment as to his purposes when he got what they only could give
him. That great and, in a free government, criminal act of deceit
has rightly called down on him the lasting dislike and contempt of
his party's leaders and of honest men in both parties."