Moreover, there are numbers of States and municipalities where very little has as yet been done to do away with the spoils system.

But in the National Government scores of thousands of offices have been put under the merit system, chiefly through the action of the National Civil Service Commission.
The use of Government offices as patronage is a handicap difficult to overestimate from the standpoint of those who strive to get good government.

Any effort for reform of any sort, National, State, or municipal, results in the reformers immediately finding themselves face to face with an organized band of drilled mercenaries who are paid out of the public chest to train themselves with such skill that ordinary good citizens when they meet them at the polls are in much the position of militia matched against regular troops.

Yet these citizens themselves support and pay their opponents in such a way that they are drilled to overthrow the very men who support them.

Civil Service Reform is designed primarily to give the average American citizen a fair chance in politics, to give to this citizen the same weight in politics that the "ward heeler" has.
Patronage does not really help a party.