(2) The whole number employed (or appointed) during said year for the Classified Postal service was 1,473. There are no carriers, and very few clerks, at the post-offices who are females. Adding those previously examined and appointed for the Postal service, we have an aggregate of 9,287 persons examined and of 3,094 appointed in two and one-half years. Further particulars of these examinations and appointments will be found in Table No. 10 of Appendix No. 6.

THE EVILS TO BE REMEDIED.

A stage has been reached in the progress of reform at which it will be profitable to compare the situation three years ago, when the Civil Service Bill was before the Senate, with the present.

That situation is clearly outlined in the unanimous report of the Senate committee, composed of members of both parties, which reported the Civil Service Bill to the Senate in May, 1882. The report uses this language:

"Political considerations have come to play the most important part in the distribution of the vast patronage. It has come to pass that the work of paying political debts and discharging political obligations, of rewarding personal friends and punishing personal foes, is the first to confront each President. He is compelled to give daily audience to those who personally seek place or to the army of those who back them. Instead of the study of great questions of states

manship, of broad and comprehensive administrative policy, or the relations of this great nation to the other nations of the earth, he must devote himself to the petty business of weighing in the balance the political considerations that shall determine the claim of this friend or of that political supporter. The office of Chief Magistrate has undergone in practice a radical change.

"There has grown up such a perversion of the duties of that high office, such a prostitution of it to ends unworthy the great idea of its creation, that a change has already come in the character of the Government itself, which if not corrected will be permanent and disastrous. The Chief Magistrate of this nation wears out his term and his life in the petty services of party. He gives daily au dience to beggars for place and sits in judgment upon the party claims of contestants. * *The Executive Mansion is besieged, if not sacked. * * Every Chief Magistrate, since the evil has grown to its present proportions, has cried out for deliverance. * The maligu influence of political domination in appointments to office is widespread and reaches out from the President himself to all possible means of approach to the appointing power. It poisons the very air we breathe. No Congressman in accord with the dispenser of power can wholly escape it. * * When he awakes in the morning it is at his door, and when he retires at night it haunts his chamber. It goes before him, it follows

after him, and it meets him on the way. It levies contributions on all the relationships of a Congressman's life; summons kinship, friendship, and interest to its aid, and imposes upon him a work which is never finished, and from which there is no release. Time is consumed, strength is exhausted, the mind is absorbed, and the vital forces of the legislator, mental as well as physical, are spent in the never ending struggle for offices. It has come to be a widespread belief that the public service is a charitable institution, furnishing employment to the needy and a home to those adrift. * The number of those who thus crowd all avenues of approach to places in the public service is constantly on the increase, and is daily becoming more importunate. The late Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Windom, is reported to have said that five sixths of the applicants for office, while he administered the Treasury, based their demands not on merit or fitness, or character, but on their poverty and incapacity otherwise to obtain a livelihood."

Every President, for many years, had appealed to Congress for relief from those degrading duties imposed by the spoils system. In his annual message of December, 1870, President Grant said: "There is no duty which so much embarrasses the Executive and heads of Departments as that of appointment. The present system does not secure the best men, and not often fit men for the public service. The elevation and purification of the civil service of the Government will be hailed with approval by the people of the whole United States." President Hayes, in several messages, urged upon Congress the duty of legislation for the reform of administrative abuses.

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In March, 1870, Mr. Garfield said in the House of Representatives: "We press appointments upon the Departments, we crowd the doors. Senators and Representatives throng the offices and the bureaus until the public business is obstructed; and men are appointed not because they are fit for their positions, but because we ask it. There, Mr. Chairman, in my judgment, is the true field for retrenchment and reform. * In this direction is the true line of statesmanship." And seven years later, in the Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Garfield declared that "one-third of the working hours of members is hardly sufficient to meet the demands upon them in reference to appointments. The present system

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pairs the efficiency of the legislators, it degrades the civil service, it repels from the service those high and manly qualities which are so essential to a pure and efficient administration; and, finally, it debauches the public mind by holding up public office as the reward of mere party zeal."

President Arthur pointedly stated the same duty and his readiness to co-operate in a reform policy, the beneficial effects of which he had seen in the New York custom-house.

President Cleveland, when governor of New York, approved a civil service act for that State and its cities which is closely analogous to the 12435 C S-2

Federal Civil Service Act. He appointed a commission and promulgated rules now being enforced in that State. His first annual message as President, referring to the spoils system, contains this language:

"Doubts may well be entertained whether our Government could survive the strain of a continuance of this system, which upon every change of administration inspires an immense army of claimants for office to lay siege to the patronage of Government, engrossing the time of public officers with their importunities, spreading abroad the conta gion of their disappointment, and filling the air with the tumult of their discontent.

"The allurements of an immense number of offices and places, exhibited to the voters of the land, and the promise of their bestowal in recognition of partisan activity, debauch the suffrage and rob political action of its thoughtful and deliberative character. The evil would increase with the multiplication of offices consequent upon our extension, and the mania for office-holding, growing from its indulgence, would pervade our population so generally that patriotic purpose, the support of principle, the desire for the public good and solicitude for the nation's welfare, would be nearly banished from the activity of our party contests, and cause them to degenerate into ignoble, selfish, and disgraceful struggles for the possession of office.

"Civil Service Reform, enforced by law, came none too soon to check the progress of demoralization."

What the Senate committee said of the pressure upon the President was hardly less applicable to the heads of the great departments at Washington, and to customs officers and postmasters. There have been times at New York when applicants for places not only filled the collector's office, but the steps and the corridors. Heads of departments at Washington, for considerable periods, had found half their time hardly adequate for dealing with office-seekers.

There was an element of this office-seeking, especially at Washington, little noticed in the report quoted, which was the most pernicious and dangerous of all. It was that incessant pressure for places and for removals and promotions on the part of members of both houses of Congress to which Mr. Garfield referred. A great majority of the members, condemning and lamenting the practice, only participated in it under the coercions of a formidable demand from party leaders and their henchmen. Yet there were members who were bold in demanding places they had promised for votes, and they did not scruple to allow heads of bureaus and departments to understand that the legislation and appropria tions they would need, if not their own positions, might depend upon compliance with such demands. It was not the worst result that many unworthy persons secured salaries they did not earn and promotions they did not merit. It was not the worst result that many supernumeraries were put upon the pay-rolls, and that men unfit for Congress gained elections by the votes of office-seekers bribed by the promise of offices.

The system tended strongly to corrupt relations between executive officers and members of Congress. The most worthy in the departments were in daily peril of losing their places, and the conviction was general that merit could not insure promotions. But this even was not the worst result of this congressional usurpation; Senators and Members of Congress daily usurped more and more of the appointing power of the executive, so that the constitutional counter-poise of the executive and legislative branches of the Government was being impaired and its very stability was threatened.

The intrigue and scramble for places at the post-offices and customhouses was in every way pernicious. The ability of local demagogues and manipulators to dispose of them for money and to exact annual assessments and partisan work at their discretion, from those who obtained them, constituted at once the working force and the pecuniary strength of those rings and cliques which defied the higher public opinion and controlled the elections. They made "Bossism" in politics the key to public employments.

The postal and customs offices are the business agencies of the people, where party politics and intrigues for carrying elections have no more fit place than at a college, a factory, or a fort. Yet they had become the centers of an intense, pernicious partisan activity, which had impaired their business efficiency in the same degree in which they had increased their cost and lowered their moral standards. A collector or a postmaster had come to be looked upon-had perhaps been confirmed by the Senate-more as a party manager than a business agent. His subordinates were quite generally selected in main reference to their expected efficiency as workers for the dominant party. They and their chief might determine the election of a Senator if not the vote of a State. The confirmation of a collector or postmaster but too often left the patronage of his office at the disposition of the Senators from his State. Senators seemed likely to become the feudal despots of State politics.

It would be a very superficial view of the subject to regard the mere pressure for place or the time of Presidents, heads of departments, or members of Congress occupied in listening to office-seekers and dispensing appointments, as the greater parts of these evils. Nearly every case of such pressure for an office is but an incident in a vicious, venal struggle, which began away back among the people, or, more correctly, among a clique of politicians, which had in it such elements of hate, rivalry, and jealousy as no bargain, promises, or threats could subdue. For every case of a real contest before the appointing power there were many cases settled by a venal bargain or "deal" in which little or nothing beyond the interests of patronage-mongers or factions was considered. A system which made appointments depend upon favor, influence, and party expediency placed the whole subject of office-getting and all official life on that low plane of selfishness and injustice which

could never command the respect of the people. They saw plainly that such a system did not make-it hardly pretended to make-high character, self-respecting manhood, and ability to do well the public work the real tests of appointments. It plainly made its sole tests for office the exhibition of such degrading qualifications as subserviency, working for candidates under promise of their influence, capacity for carrying elec tions and being useful to great politicians. The young men and women of the country were more and more feeling that servility to party leaders and plausible and pertinacious solicitation, rather than excellence in the schools, capacity for business, or manly and womanly character and self respect, were effective for opening the gates to office.

It was inevitable, under such a system, that official life should sink low in public estimation, that worthy minds should be repelled, that the politician class should monopolize the Executive service, that the public administration should be thought unworthy of the people and unfriendly to its noble system of public schools, that patriotic citizens should be aroused, that Presidents and Congress should become alarmed.

POLITICAL ASSESSMENTS.

But there was yet another class of evils which must not be overlooked, those which spring from political assessments. The practice of compelling employés and officers of the Government-national, State, and municipal to hand over, under peril of removal or despair of promotion, a portion of their wages and salaries, arbitrarily determined by great officers and politicians, in aid of partisan elections, Federal, State, and municipal, had largely prevailed for more than a generation. Both parties had been equally guilty of this despotic and degrading prostitution of official authority. It outraged and humiliated the public serv ants in the same degree that it developed a despotic spirit in their oppressors. The former might well feel it right to revenge the wrong thus doue them by neglecting the public interest or by filling their pock ets at the public expense. If the salary was but reasonable the official had been directly robbed. If the salary had been made excessive so that the official might not suffer, as was doubtless sometimes the case, the public Treasury had been indirectly robbed.

In such ways vast sums were secured by party managers and candidates, which were expended without accountability, serving to subsi dize the press, to buy votes, and to support all that was most secret, degrading, and corrupt in party politics. President Garfield, when in Congress, declared that a large part of the money extorted never got "further than the shysters and camp followers of the party." The more unscrupulous the candidate and the more venal his followers, the more effective and vicious the use made of this vast corruption fund of poli tics. It hardly need be mentioned that such a system tended equally to make office-getting and party management a profitable and absorb