letters in reference to the matter; of re-enforcing the support that an employé has; or of seeking to restore those who are discharged in times of reduction or for an alleged or a real falling below the standard, or discharged, perhaps, to give place to a protégé of some more favored or more ardent politician.

"We listen to the appeals of the utterly destitute. The widow comes here whose husband has been a long time a clerk or public servant somewhere, and it is impossible not to sympathize, it is impossible not to say that it would be reasonable, if she were well qualified, that she should have a clerkship. She has a dependent family; she has, perhaps, dependent relatives. You know there are scattered about these departments many who are the children of men well known in the public service of the United States, and among whose honors it was that they went out of that service penniless, whose misfortune it was that they left dependent relatives. No man can say, 'I will close my eyes and shut my ears to these appeals.' He can not do it. He may put himself upon the cold ground that it is my duty to be studying public measures, to be reading and thinking about and preparing for the great measures that concern the whole country'; but he comes up from his breakfast-table and finds his room full of cases that he must at least hear.

"Nor is this a matter that embarrasses one party alone. I have known gentlemen-yes, I see one now in the chamber, not a member of my own party, whom I have heard cry out against the burden, the painful labor that pained and oppressed him, and, in the vexation of the moment, declare that he would leave this hall, and go back to his farm and his happy home. There is something wrong about all this. This Government is not running a great charitable establishment; and yet, if it is to employ people in subordinate positions, you will say that equitably nobody has a better claim than a widow, or daughter, or sister, or brother of some old-time public servant, whose family for many years has been accustomed to the service of the United States, knows what it is, and can discharge the duties well; or than the dependent relative of some faithful soldier.

"There must be some relief. I said there will be. I say there can be one easily found, theoretically. Every man here, whether opposed to civil-service reform, in the ordinary language, or in favor of it, sees that he can devise some plan by which these things can be very much bettered. Well, practically there has been, in a limited area in this country, a vast improvement, and that area can be extended. I forbear to illustrate by the example of Great Britain, chiefly because many of the circumstances there are quite different. The ancient history of the civil service is different; the relations of executive and legislative power are different. They have an avowed life-term; they have pensions; they have a right of pen

sion that grows with the years of service, analogous to what the army calls the 'old fogy ration.' There are various provisions there for which our public sentiment is not ripe, I am sure.

"Now, the bill before us does not attempt to reach the whole possible field of civil-service reform. Say there are a hundred acres over which you may imagine that it could spread. We know we have established it well in one or two or three of the bundred acres, and we know perfectly well that there are ten or fifteen acres quite analogous in conditions in which it can be equally well established; and these are about the proportions of what the present bill proposes to do. It makes no experiment; there is not a thing to be done here in this bill that has not been done, that is not being done every month, in the post-office and custom-house at New York, and to a limited extent in other places.

"The bill contains within itself a power of indefinite extension according to the judgment of the commissioners or the chief executive officer. Now, do not let us indulge in any ideal views on this subject-ideal in the direction of optimism or otherwise. You hear some of the ardent and enthusiastic friends of this measure, just as you will hear in all cases of change or reform, believing that all the evils of the civil service will vanish the moment you shall have put an iron framework of some description upon the statute-book. That is not to be so. There are to be evils, there are to be misfortunes, there are to be, if you choose, weaknesses and corruptions, no matter what system you may adopt. But I protest a great deal more vigorously against an extreme denunciation of the existing system of the country. It has become the fashion-and I take the opportunity to say it here-it has become the fashion, very largely among a class of men who have, or claim for themselves, and may to some extent be admitted to have, a culture superior to the average-the literary, the dilettante fashion—to speak of the whole public service of this country as corrupt. I have read, and you all have lately, and you will read frequently, in articles by these gentlemen contributed to the journals and the reviews, and in their speeches and letters, constant reference to the ruinous condition of this country and to the corrupt state of the whole public service, to the degradation of politics. These men will say, and visitors from other nations will hear them and go home and write. that gentlemen here can not enter into political affairs, and that if such and such things were different the men of culture and education and standing in the community, the gentlemen of America, would go into politics. They have no right to this language. The gentleman, the true gentleman, sir, if he sees that his country needs the reform he alleges, if he believes that its politics are in the low, mean, and corrupt condition often described, will charge into the middle of the fray; he will put himself into

politics. I have an unutterable contempt for the man who justifies his neglect of his public duties by talking about the dirty waters of politics. If they are dirty, and he thinks he knows what they ought to be, and that if he were controlling them they would be better, then he is a coward and next door to a moral traitor if he does not come in with all his soul, and not simply sit on the fence and scold the rest of us who are in, and who are conscious of as high and honorable motives, conscious of as devoted worship of the Constitution and the laws and the glory of our country as any man in the republic.

"Sir, this country is not in a ruinous condition; it is the most magnificent nation that ever lived under the sun. There are fifty-five millions of people here; some of us now here will be living when they shall number one hundred millions of people. The nation has gone through the most glorious war known in history. I am not now speaking of it at all in a partisan way. If you go to the very essence of it on both sides, it was a contest over the very fundamental question of society and of government. It was a case where forty millions of people took up the sword by the hundred thousand, and even by the million, to settle controversies, not concerning the control of the Suez canal or the Bosporus, or this, that, or the other mere territorial or trade question, but to decide upon the political and social foundations on which the future hundreds of millions of this continent shall rest.

"Look at our general financial condition. There is not a nation in the world that does not envy us the embarrassment under which we labor to-day, the embarrassment of an extraordinary and excessive revenue. We are pained by what? By debts that stagger and shake us? No; by the question of how we shall reduce our revenue, and how we shall cease to reduce our debt, which we have diminished some $1,200,000,000 since the great war closed. I affirm that throughout the great branches of the public service in general the work of the Government is well done, by men who desire to do it well. I appeal to the records of the collection of our revenue; I appeal to the figures of the reduction of our debt; I appeal to the facility with which we borrow money, and to the matchless credit this nation has now in every money market of the world. I appeal in other fields to the general provisions of our Constitution and of our fundamental laws to show that the rule of the country, however imperfect the practice of it may be, is absolute and universal freedom, equality, justice. These things the people worship; these things are in words in our Constitution and laws; they are essentially in the hearts of our people, and toward the perfection of the administration of them we are steadily aiming and marching. I believe in my country; I believe it is an honest country, as honest as ever lived: I believe it is the strongest and freest and best;

and, if I may say it, it has as good a civil service as any other country, or a better one.

"At the same time I am ardently in favor of this bill and measures of this description, to be followed steadily in search of better things. I said, do not let us indulge an idea that we can make a perfect system and eliminate all evils or possibilities of evil. We can lay out some general lines under which the civil service shall be administered, without attempting to fill up the minute details. The more you do that, the more you embarrass the officers charged with the execution of the plan, and the more you relieve them from personal responsibility. I would say generally: Within such and such lines you shall conduct it. We do not tell you what you shall do in this, that, and the other minute affair, because the duties and proprieties will vary in each of these cases; but we hold you, the President, or this Cabinet officer, or that chief of a minor bureau, or the head of a post-office or custom-house-we hold you responsible for the thorough administration of all affairs under you under these general rules.'

"Sir, I think perhaps the most perfect human machine in the world is a regiment fully organized, with ranks full, and fully equipped. For every duty there is a man; for every man there is a duty, well graded, well related. If every man but half tries to do his duty there is no more charming movement in the world, not even that of the finest chronometer, than that of a regiment; and the essence of military organization-which military organization we are not expected to copy in civil affairs, but which nevertheless can teach us a great deal-one of the essential things of it at least is the responsibility of chiefs. The general of division or of a corps rides through a camp and perceives one regiment perfect in the performance of duty; another slovenly, dirty, with ill-regulated ranks and ignorant of duty. He does not stop to rebuke individual men. He rides back to his tent and sends word to the colonel, and that colonel makes that a better regiment speedily or he goes.

"In general analogy to that must be any good system of civil service which we shall impose, for if you attempt to tie the hands of the chief of a bureau or the chief of a department in the civil service against removals and against what you may choose to call punishment, and against some control of promotion also, just to that extent you relieve him from responsibility; just to that extent you fortify the subordinate against him, and he will encounter insolence and negligence and freely-expressed criticisms and defiance. I think no man who has had military experience would consent to take charge of a bureau of 100 persons without having something of the power of prompt removal and promotion vested in his own hands. This bill does not seek to remove those entirely, by any means.

"It is said that the President has power to do what we propose to do here. So he has,

substantially. He has it, I might say, generally and without reference to any particular statute, from the fact of his being the Chief Executive, from the general provisions of the Constitution. And we put into the statute-book in 1871 (see section 1753) these words:

"The President is authorized to prescribe such regulations for the admission of persons into the civil service of the United States as may best promote the efficiency thereof, and ascertain the fitness of each candidate in respect to age, health, character, knowledge, and ability for the branch of service into which he seeks to enter; and for this purpose he may employ suitable persons to conduct such inquiries, and may prescribe their duties, and establish regulations for the conduct of persons who may receive appoint

ments in the civil service.

"Under that provision the President might, perhaps, do nearly all that one can here require or expect the executive department to do; but the difficulty is that it is almost impossible to do these things with the tacit and yet actual opposition of the leading body of political men in the country, and without the cordial sanction of Congress. For two years Congress gave Gen. Grant the money necessary to conduct a reform in the civil service, to pay his commission, etc., and then he asked for it in vain three years in succession. He abandoned the effort, saying frankly to Congress that if this work was not sanctioned by the vote of the legislative body, if the country really did not demand it, he should be obliged to surrender his efforts. And yet in the report made in that very year by the able civil-service commission these points are considered as established by their two or three years' practice. I have no doubt they were, because here in my hand is the volume of testimony (Report 576) given before the committee of which I have the honor to be chairman, during the last session, largely from the customhouses of New York, Boston, and Baltimore, and the post-office of New York, and it shows that similar results are attained to-day. These are the results the civil-service commission claimed to have reached, and in Gen. Grant's message of April 18, 1874, the statements were adopted with the specific approval of the Cabinet, as the message asserts:

"1. They have, on an average, where examinations apply, given persons of superior capacity and character to the service of the Government, and have tended to exclude unworthy applicants.

"2. They have developed more energy in the discharge of duty, and more ambition to acquire information connected with official functions on the part of

those in the service.

3. They have diminished the unreasonable solicitation and pressure which numerous applicants and their friends, competing for appointments, have before brought to bear upon the departments in the direction

of favoritism.

"4. They have, especially where competition applics, relieved the heads of departments and of bureaus, to a large extent, of the necessity of devoting to persons soliciting places for themselves or for others time which was needed for official duties.

"5. They have made it more practicable to dismiss from the service those who came in under the civilservice examinations, when not found worthy, than it was or is to dismiss the like unworthy persons who

had been introduced into the service through favor or

dictation.

sure, before too frequent, for causing the removal of "6. They have diminished the intrigue and presworthy persons for the mere purpose of bringing other, perhaps interior, persons into the service.

"For these reasons the committee on this subject has reported in favor of continuing it. I have indicated our reasons for proposing a bill to vindicate and strengthen the Executive in carrying this reform into practical effect. And here is the bill."

Mr. Hoar, of Massachusetts, also advocated the passage of the bill. He said:

time, the country and Congress are now agreed "Unless I much mistake the signs of the in support of this measure. We are to be congratulated even upon some of the events which have taken place recently, much as we may have originally disapproved them, in so far as they have tended to bring about so much unanimity between the different political parties upon this question. From the necessity of the case, no reform in the civil-service administration of the country which takes it out from the domain of politics can ever be permanently accomplished to which both of the great parties in the country are not committed. From the necessity of the case, the party which has been in the minority, and whose opponents have possessed the administration, must, when these measures are accomplished, entitle itself to the respect and confidence of the country by a considerable act of immediate self-denial.

"Under the present system the civil service of the country is made up, and always will be made up, largely of the adherents of a single political party, and if the opponents of that party are so short-sighted as to admit that the principal object of their existence is to displace their political opponents and to gain those offices for themselves, by resistance to any wellconsidered scheme of reform in this particular, the evil will never be overcome. One half, or nearly one half, the American people are asked to indicate and emphasize their patriotism and their fitness for the administration of the coun

try by denying and disdaining the use of a weapon of which they have felt the edge and the weight for many years. There is no doubt of it. It has got to be met; and unless there be statesmanship enough, and confidence in the capacity of the American people to recognize and to reward statesmanship enough, to waive that objection, the evils which now exist and prevail must be taken to be incurable.

"I think we are to be congratulated upon the indication of so far substantial unanimity in the passage of this measure, that the gentleman whose name is connected with it is an honored and distinguished leader of one side, that the chairman of the committee which reports it is an honored and distinguished leader on the other side, and that a President of the United States not identified heretofore specially in the public mind with this reform, promises in advance to give his signature and his

support to the measure if Congress shall agree upon it.

"When the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Pendleton) addressed the Senate, the other day, he directed some very eloquent and very severe reproaches against the Republican party. These reproaches were by no means wholly undeserved. They ought to be met not by counter-reproaches, not by undertaking to show by way of set-off similar conduct, or similar misconduct, on the part of his party, but by admitting and conceding the fact that this system which has come down to us from the very origin of party government in this country has gone on, sometimes operating better and sometimes operating worse, until it has reached a point where some of the abuses to which it is liable have excited the attention of the American people and caused a demand for their reform.

"When Mr. Jefferson came into power in 1801, as I said the other day, he encountered the same condition of things that the Democratic party encounters to-day. He declared that he found the civil offices of the country filled without an exception by the opponents of his administration, and he was obliged to hold back a wave and torrent of indignation from his own associates, demanding the use of the civil service of the country to establish its party in power. I have upon my desk here the correspondence between Mr. Jefferson's Attorney-General and himself with regard to the appointments in the State of Connecticut, in which a large committee of leading Connecticut Republicans set forth the political proscription under which they have labored for the past twelve years, during Adams's and Washington's administrations, at the hands of the Connecticut Federalists, and recommending the exercise of the President's power of removal to cure that condition.

"Mr. Jefferson replies in one letter he thinks the Connecticut Federalists will find that he can be as intolerant as they can; in another he proposes to exercise the power of removal in regard to all United States district attorneys and marshals and to stand at the porch of the courts; in a third, that he proposes to turn out all the men who sympathize with Hamilton and the Essex junta, whom he regards as incurable, fit only for a mad-house; and in another that he shall regard activity in the late revolution (that is, the revolution which had placed him in power) as a good reason for a political appointment, and activity on the other side as a good reason for a political removal. He says that he advises his correspondent to give him a list of the obnoxious Federalists in his State, and leave the rest to me.' When these things are done, and the Republican party-as it was then called, the Jefferson party-has attained its fair and just proportion of the civil offices in the country he hopes then, and it is in that connection he uttered his famous sentence, to be able to inquire, as to the person to be ap

pointed to office, 'Is he honest, is he capable, is he faithful to the Constitution?'

"I will have the letter of Mr. Lincoln, Attorney-General of the United States under Mr. Jefferson, placed in the 'Record,' so that it may be read by the Senate and by the public without my reading it. The Attorney-General recommends to Mr. Jefferson that he shall not make all his removals at once, because, he says, that will make all the officers removed and all their friends unite in opposition to his administration; that he had better remove by degrees and let the process extend over a year or two, because then the first batch will be the only ones that will complain, and those who are left, with their friends, will stand by the Administration, thinking they are to escape.

"So that it is an entire injustice to say that when Mr. Marcy, under Jackson, made his coarse and well-known statement, that 'to the victors belong the spoils,' he was introducing for the first time this vicious system. He was avowing not a new system, but was frankly stating a system which had so far preceded the accession of Mr. Jefferson to power in 1801 that when he came in he did not find, he said, a single one of his political associates in office.

"As I said, the thing which the Democratic party is asked to do in giving its assistance to this measure is an immediate and present sacrifice for the permanent and enduring welfare of this country, and the question of its fitness ever to be trusted with administration will in my judgment be very largely determined by the American people at some time in the future as it shall itself decide this question.

"It is, I think, fairly to be said in extenuation (if it were desirable to enter into an extenuation of the conduct of those who have been charged with administration in this country) that it is only within a very recent period that there has been any substantial and adequate support in public opinion of this reform. President Grant entered upon the administration of the Government on the 4th of March, 1869, in my opinion penetrated with an earnest desire to elevate the civil service of the country not only above corruption but above party. The first important political event of his administration was the warfare of the leaders of this body when he attempted to construct the Circuit Court of the United States in favor of their claim to exercise their patronage and to control the Executive in that particular.

"Again and again down to 1874 President Grant urged upon Congress the necessary appropriation and the necessary legislation to enable him to elevate the civil service of the country above party. The result is shown in President Grant's message of 1874, an extract from which, I think, was read by the honorable Senator from Connecticut. If so, I shall not read it again. In it President Grant declares that he shall regard the refusal by the legis lative power of the continuance of the small appropriation of $25,000 in aid of his measure

as a final judgment by Congress against its expediency, and gives notice that he should thereafter abandon the attempt.

"Now, the time has come when these two belligerents are asked to agree to disuse in our political conflicts hereafter an instrument of warfare which has been so injurious to the public interest hitherto. We wish if we can now, taking advantage of the present earnest condition of public sentiment, excited on this subject, to stereotype these expressions of public opinion into a statute which may be per

manent.

"Mr. President, I expect to support the bill of the committee, and, without entering upon the details which have been so much discussed, and which will be discussed further I dare say, I expect to support it for these reasons: First, that it is the measure agreed upon by the large majority of persons who have made special study of this cause. I do not propose to surrender to any man or to any body of men the prerogative or the duties of the members of this body; but I think in discharging our duties, taking upon ourselves as we must the ultimate responsibility of every measure, it is proper that a large respect should be had for the opinion of those persons who have specially studied for years the evil which we are seeking to remove, who have specially studied the proper remedy, and to whose efforts the existing public sentiment on the subject is largely due.

"Next, the bill commends itself to my judgment because it proceeds with a statesmanlike caution in making the necessary experiment and proceeding from step to step. It is applicable to only a few of the great public offices in the country besides the seven departments existing in the city of Washington. It applies, I think, to about thirty offices only out of Washington and to the departments here, and it permits the President, if he see fit, to extend gradually, as experience shall warrant, there being full opportunity for the legislative power to amend or supply any defects in this bill hereafter, until finally, if it is found expedient, it shall embrace the entire civil service of the country so far as it can be properly applied.

"Again, it is a measure justified by experience in the great offices at New York, and to some extent in Boston and in the Department of the Interior here. It is difficult to raise a practical objection to any detail of the bill to which an answer is not found in the reports of the experience of Mr. James and Mr. Pearson in the post-office in the city of New York. Every public officer to whom there comes any responsibility in putting on trial this scheme becomes a convert to its practicability and its wisdom. Every public officer under whose administration this scheme is permanently enforced becomes, as the months and years go by, a more enthusiastic and emphatic adherent of this plan.

"The measure commends itself to me also

because it carefully and wisely avoids all the disputed constitutional questions which have been raised in the discussion of this subject. It nowhere trenches upon the constitutional power of the President under any definition or limitation, even the largest and broadest, of the executive powers which is to be found in our constitutional discussions. The President's right to make rules, to apply rules, to change rules, the President's responsibility growing out of his constitutional duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed, are not impaired, and in my judgment can not be impaired by legislation. I do not understand that it has been the purpose of the honorable Senator from Ohio in reporting this bill in any degree to infringe upon the constitutional prerogative of the Executive.

"It does not assert any disputed legislative control over the tenure of office. The great debate as to the President's power of removal, the legislative power to establish a tenure of office with which the President could not interfere, which began in the first Congress, which continued during the contests of the Senate with Andrew Jackson, revived again at the time of the impeachment of Johnson, and again in the more recent discussion over the Tenure-of-Office Bill in the beginning of the administration of President Grant, does not in the least become important under the skillful and admirable provisions of this bill.

"It does not even (and that is a criticism made upon it, but in my judgment it is one of its conspicuous merits) deal directly with the question of removals, but it takes away every possible temptation to improper removals. What Executive, what head of a department, what influential public man anywhere can seek in the least to force a worthy and deserving public officer from his office merely that there may be a competitive examination to fill his place-to fill a place at the bottom of the list, not to fill his place, as is well suggested?

"Now, Mr. President, while this avoids the use of any doubtful constitutional power or mechanism to create a removal, it, as I have said, cures the great abuse which has existed recently by removing the temptation to an improper removal. In my own judgment the abuse of improper, cruel, and unjust removals of worthy and deserving public officers is an abuse almost or quite equal to the other against which this bill directly aims, the use of the civil service of the country as a political instrumentality.

"I congratulate the Senator from Ohio, I congratulate the Senator from Connecticut, I congratulate the country, on the auspicious circumstances under which this bill has been presented; and, whatever else may happen, I believe if this system shall be inaugurated now, the session of this winter will be one of the marked and conspicuous eras in the political history of the country, as the time when the two great political parties were willing, under