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3. Selections for the executive service on the basis of official favor and partisan influence must be suppressed by requiring examinations and other adequate tests of character and capacity as the conditions of entering this service.

4. The true responsibility and independence of the legislative and executive departments under the Constitution must be restored and preserved.

I.

The civil service act (section 2, clause 2, sub. 6), referring to the public service at large, declares "that no person in said service has any right to use his official authority or influence to coerce the political action of any person or body."

In making the rules, the President exercised not only the authority conferred by that act and by the Revised Statutes (section 1753,) but also that vested in the Executive by the Constitution. This ample authority, exercised in the spirit of the act, enabled the President to give its purpose a more emphatic and comprehensive expression in the language of the first rule.

The second rule, which declares that no person by reason of being in the employment of the people shall be under any obligation to render any political service, and that he will not be removed or otherwise prejudiced for refusing to do so, is in the same spirit, and may be regarded as a complement of the first rule; the first asserting the right of the private citizen to freedom from the coercion of executive officers, and the second asserting the right of such officers to freedom from the coercion of parties and factions.

The enactment by Congress of the provisions quoted is the highest evidence of grave abuses against which such rules are aimed. It is too early to speak with definiteness of the effects of these rules. The influence of old habits and theories affects conduct long after new standards of duty have been accepted. Though under Rule 23 a violation of either rule is made good cause for removal, the utility of such rules must in some degree rest in their power as precepts; for obviously only gross forms of their violation can be easily proved. The first step towards the protection of all rights is the distinct recognition of them and the public acknowledgment of a duty to protect them. That step at least has been taken. In the face of pledges at once formal and public, it will require more audacity to invade, and there will be a readier courage to defend, the freedom which it is the object of the first two rules to guarantee.

No case of the violation of either, in the particulars referred to, has been laid before the Commission. Whether in the period since the Civil Service rules went into effect there has not been a diminished tendency on the part of Federal officers to meddle with the political action of citizens, and a more vigorous and general condemnation of the

practice by the public, are questions to be decided upon a careful observation of the facts, which are as open to all others as to the members of the Commission.

Those parts of the act and of the rules which forbid political assessments, which prohibit discrimination by reason of political or religious opinions in making appointments (Rule 8) and which compel selections for the public service on the basis of merit instead of favor and influence, strongly support the freedom and justice which it is the special object of the first two rules to maintain.

II.

The provisions of the act (sections 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15) against assessments or other forms of extortion for political purposes from the fears of those whose tenure of office is precarious, prohibit officers and employés paid from the national Treasury becoming the collectors or receivers for such purposes of any part of each other's earnings. They forbid the solicitation or reception of assessments in the offices, navyyards, forts, or arsenals of the nation. They make penal the discharge,. promotion, change of compensation, or any form of degradation of any public servant by reason of any payment or non-payment for such purposes. Their aim is to secure to that class of citizens the real liberty to pay or not to pay, without loss of salary or occupation, of which many of them have long been deprived. Statutory provisions so ample made it unnecessary for the President to do more than to declare his accord with their spirit, and to pledge the exercise of his authority for the same ends. This much is done in Rule 2, taken in connection with Rule 23, which makes any violation of these provisions or of the rules "good cause for removal."

The fifteenth section of the act, moreover, makes the violation of any of these provisions punishable by fine or imprisonment. This fact, as well as the very nature of the subject itself, points to the courts as the most appropriate and efficient bodies for dealing with such offenses. They alone can compel the attendance of witnesses, administer oaths, require the production of papers, and decide upon and enforce adequate punishment.

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The Commission has, nevertheless, the duty to bring to the notice of the President, or of other proper executive officers, any information it may have calling for a removal. It may investigate charges. It is required to state in its reports the practical effect of the law and the rules in this as well as in other particulars.

No information calling for such removal has as yet come before the Commission. An investigation now being conducted by the Commission tends to show that the twelfth section of the act has been violated by a private citizen from each of two States, in the form of surreptitiously sending or carrying circulars into the Departments at Washington, by which contributions were solicited from those in the public service in aid of

the political funds of those States, and one or more of the employés in those Departments appears to have assisted in the distribution of these circulars, but apparently without knowing their contents or the purpose of their distribution. We are satisfied that but trifling sums have been secured, and this illegal practice appears to have ceased upon public attention being called to it.

That the threat of these punishments has greatly increased the sense of freedom of those in the public service to pay or not to pay political assessments, and that it has consequently greatly diminished the amount paid, seem to be facts generally recognized.

With a view to more definite statements, we have obtained information from as many as possible of those best informed, mainly in those parts of the country where Federal officials are the most numerous and the collection of assessments has heretofore been most enforced. The conclusions we have reached are as follows:

1. That the amounts for corresponding periods collected from the same number of Federal officers and employés since the act went into ef- fect have not been more than from one-half to one fourth as much as formerly, and that while a feeling of complete safety in declining to pay is by no means attained, this diminution in the amount collected would otherwise measure the proportion of the whole amounts before secured which was paid by reason of fears of removal or hopes of promotion.

2. That the requests for contributions since the act went into effect have not employed the language of menace or demanded definite amounts or a percentage of salaries, but they have distinctly recognized the freedom of the public servant by appealing to him, not as a member of a class of annual rent-payers, but respectfully, as if he had the same liberty, rights, and duties as any other citizen.

3. That the practice of former years of opening in the great cities, near the public offices, assessment-collection bureaus, to which partisan tax gatherers summoned the clerks and laborers of the Government, and from which they were pursued to their desks and workshops, has been wholly discontinued.

4. These changes, and the undiminished vigor and enthusiasm of parties at the late elections, have made clearer the truths that an office, however humble, is a public trust and not a favor held on condition of an annual rent; and that a party, whether in power or out of power, may not only maintain a vigorous life but may effectively present its just claims for support, without extorting the expenses from those humble servants of the nation who are least able to defend their rights as freemen.

NOTE. It may be mentioned as one of the indirect effects of the civil service act that, within a few weeks after its passage, a law was enacted in the State of New York with provisions against political assessments even more stringent than those of the act of Congress, and that they extend not only to the public servants of the State but to those of its counties, municipalities, and towns as well.

III.

The most important and exacting duties of the Commission are connected with the examinations and other tests of character and capacity for which the act provides, and which, subject to the rules, it places in charge of the Commission. The examinations are the direct object of several of the rules.

It is the main purpose of the act to establish a system of examinations for ascertaining the fitness of applicants for doing the public work. The new system is to take the place of that vast machinery of patronage, largely based on official favor and social and political influence, which, though materially curtailed in recent years, had long been the most effective means of entering the executive service. In other words, a merit system of office is substituted for a spoils system. There can be no more emphatic evidence that the old system had become intolerable than the passage of the civil service act, by which members of Congress made a patriotic surrender of so much of their patronage. But if we have in mind a few of the worst consequences of the old system, we shall be able to more readily and fairly estimate the appropriateness and practical effects of the act and rules. They were these:

1. A virtual repudiation of the moral and legal duty of the appointing power, to select the most meritorious applicant, and consequently an unjust and despotic denial of the paramount claims of the most worthy.

2. The substitution of superior backing for superior merit as the basis of appointments seriously impaired the independence essential to the constitutional responsibility of executive officers for the proper execution of the laws.

3. Members of Congress, pursued alike by the importunate appeals of those seeking office as a charity and by the clamor and threats of those demanding it as a reward for partisan work, were no longer independent. They were almost forced to devote to office-seeking the time needed for legislation, and to foist incompetent supernumeraries upon the public treasury which it was their special duty to protect.*

4. Despite the large proportion of competent and meritorious persons who found entrance, the bringing in of so many of the political officebegging and office-earning class tended to lower the public service in the estimation of the people, and to obstruct the work of Congress.

5. Such a system caused the people to overlook the important distinction between elective officers and the constitutional advisers of the President, on the one hand, who represent and must deal with political opinions and local interests, and the purely administrative subordinates, on the other, who, representing neither opinions nor interests, should

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In a speech in Congress, in 1870, the late President Garfield used this language : "We press for appointments-we crowd the doors; Senators and Representatives fill the corridors and throng the offices until the business is obstructed, &c. The result is that unworthy persons get places."

do their work in the same manner irrespective of political or religious opinions, whatever party may be in power.

6. The system which thus made party patronage of clerkships at Washington, also made patronage of the subordinate places in the customs-offices and in the larger post-offices, the heads of which are subject to confirmation by the Senate. Selections for these places were dictated by the same influence which controlled confirmations.

The power of confirmation was thus made a dangerous political force in the States and in the elections, tending alike to impair the counterpoise between members of the two houses of Congress and between Federal and State authority.

Congress and the Executive alike, in language of marked directness and significance, have sought to suppress the graver forms of these evils of patronage; Congress by declaring, in the tenth section of the civil service act, "that no recommendation of any person who shall apply for office or place under the provisions of this act, which may be given by any Senator or Member of the House of Representatives," except as to the character or residence of the applicant, shall be received or considered by any person concerned "in making any examination or appointment under this act"; and the President by declaring in the first rule that "official authority or influence shall not be used to coerce the political action of any person or body "; in Rule 8 that "no discrimination shall be made by the appointing power by reason of political or religious opinion or affiliations"; and in Rule 16, that "selections for appointment shall be made from the four highest in grade which shall be certified for appointment on the basis of merit shown on the examinations."

Here we find perhaps the most authoritative and disinterested assertion possible of the untrustworthiness and vicious tendency of all recommendations for appointment.

This, however, was not the first emphatic condemnation by Congress of recommendations and solicitations on the part of its members. Thirty years ago these evils were already so grave that Congress was compelled to seek a remedy and took the first steps toward substituting a merit system for a patronage system. At a much earlier date in Great Britain the same causes had forced the Government to resort to examinations in order to get at real capacity for doing the public work. That older Government had found that no amount of recommendations or solicitation, coming, as they almost always do, from deeply interested parties, could be accepted as reliable evidence. The first examinations were known as pass examinations, and were confined to favorites recommended by members of Parliament, lords, bishops, and great politicians, who issued tickets of admission to the examining boards. These examinations kept out the merest dunces among those recommended, but left unbroken the old aristocratic monopoly of the gates of entrance to the examinations. In 1853 and 1855 Congress followed the example of

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