The Pleasures of Office-Seeking
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THE PLEASURES OF OFFICE-SEEKING.—
It is anticipated that not far from 100,000 office-seekers will repair to Washington to witness the inauguration.1 Of these it is very unlikely that more than one in a hundred will obtain the object of their fond desires, for though offices are ever being multiplied, claimants start up in still increasing proportion. What charm, then, can there be in office seeking, where so many chances are against the aspirant's success? What mysterious attraction can there be in serving the public, to compensate for disappointment, hope deferred, toadying this man, and playing lick-spittle to the other; when all the while the office-seeker, in the majority of instances, might be earning a comfortable maintenance for his family by honest industry? Yet the fact remains, that a man who has once held office, is thenceforth linked fast for all time to the Juggernaut car of party, and must revolve with its wheels, whatever depth of mire and mud they may pass through. Much is said about the evils of the rum trade—of the industriousness men it has converted into loafers, and the happy households it has plunged into grief and misery; but we greatly mistake if office seeking does not effect these results as surely and fatally as intemperance. A man once infected with the incurable disease of office-seeking, scorns thereafter to earn a living by working at his trade. The Dogberry of the Burdell "Grand Inquisition" is too inflated with the dignity of his office ever to think of subsiding into his former position as job printer in the Herald office, should he be defeated at a future election; and he is only a specimen of thousands.2 A man once placed in a lucrative office becomes wedded to politics, and from a producer is transferred into a consumer—from a working bee into a drone. It is about the most deplorable feature of society, because the hardest to be remedied, that this non-producing class is constantly receiving accessions to its numbers, while nothing but death can lessen them.
Notes:
1. The inauguration of James Buchanan as 15th president of the United States took place on March 4, 1857. [back]
2. The "Dogberry," or blundering official, refers to Edward Downes Connery (c.1805–1870). After working for the New York Herald, Connery became a physician and in 1855 was elected as the coroner for New York City. The Burdell murder trial was covered extensively in the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1857, and some reports indicate that Connery may have been intoxicated while examining the body of Harvey Burdell at the scene of the crime. [back]