particular district, or are related to certain persons, or have done
meritorious service in some other line of work than that which they
apply to do. The abuses of the public service are to be condemned on
account of the harm to the public interest, but there is an incidental
injustice of the same general character with that which we are
discussing. If an office is granted by favoritism or for any personal
reason to A, it cannot be given to B. If an office is filled by a
person who is unfit for it, he always keeps out somebody somewhere who
is fit for it; that is, the social injustice has a victim in an unknown
person--the Forgotten Man--and he is some person who has no political
influence, and who has known no way in which to secure the chances of
life except to deserve them. He is passed by for the noisy, pushing,
importunate, and incompetent.

I have said something disparagingly in a previous chapter about the
popular rage against combined capital, corporations, corners, selling
futures, etc., etc. The popular rage is not without reason, but it is
sadly misdirected and the real things which deserve attack are thriving
all the time. The greatest social evil with which we have to contend is
jobbery. Whatever there is in legislative charters, watering stocks,
etc., etc., which is objectionable, comes under the head of jobbery.
Jobbery is any scheme which aims to gain, not by the legitimate fruits
of industry and enterprise, but by extorting from somebody a part of
his product under guise of some pretended industrial undertaking. Of
course it is only a modification when the undertaking in question has
some legitimate character, but the occasion is used to graft upon it
devices for obtaining what has not been earned. Jobbery is the vice of
plutocracy, and it is the especial form under which plutocracy corrupts
a democratic and republican form of government. The United States is
deeply afflicted with it, and the problem of civil liberty here is to