Essex County Herald

He Didn't Get a Place.

A Washington correspondent says that the Congressman's bane is the young man who "wants a position." Hunting governmental situations for needy women and indolent middle-aged heads of families is a dreary task enough. But it has its bright side in the fact that it furnishes bread and butter to those who might otherwise be sore pressed for even the bread alone. For the insane young man, however, whose only ambition is a routine job where the work is moderate and anxiety a minimum, the Congressman or Cabinet official cherishes but scanty regard. The desired situation may, indeed, be looked up. Home influence has its weight with those authorities in Washington, and when a callow youth comes here with his valise crammed with indorsements from local dignitaries elsewhere, the person to whom he is consigned generally gets him "a place." But it is the ruin of the youth. I wish I could exhibit the average department male, the one who has settled down to the listless round of a government nobody, to the young men of other localities who aspire to similar enervation. He is a business dummy and a social corpse. By the time he has dawdled through a dozen years as a department servant he is devoid of manliness, and as incapable of acting and thinking for himself as a sawdust-stuffed doll.

Let me show how men of brains and energy view this business. Several years ago a slab-sided, awkward printer boy, from Maine, found his way to Washington, in search of "an easy place." Tom Ewing was then Secretary of the Interior. He was an uncle of our gawky place hunter. To him the youngster naturally applied for assistance in getting the desired situation. This was the encouraging answer he received from Ewing:

"I will not get you a place in any of the departments. Moreover, if you find a place and go to work, I will use all my influence to have you dismissed. I want you to go out of Washington. I am not going to have you made into a limp and helpless nonentity if I can help it. Go anywhere else—you shan't stay in Washington."

This inspiriting counsel drove the printer youth back to Maine again. Had Ewing found the desired "place" he would to-day be tying tape around bundled documents or sticking official stamps on somebody else's letters in one of the departments, an inert human routine machine. But the uncle's sensible brusqueness was the nephew's salvation. The name of this sagacious young applicant was James G. Blaine, present Speaker of the House of Representatives.