vility to its leaders or to great officers, can be accepted as good reasons for making appointments to such places, the duties of which should be peformed in the same non-partisan and business-like manner whatever party may be in power, or whatever may be the politics or religion of the public servant.

(5) That the system so long accepted, under which mere recommendations, official favoritism, and political and social influence, not infrequently united with intrigue and corruption have been efficient for securing appointments, should give place to a system based on character, capacity, and justice, irrespective of political or religious opinions. (6) That recommendations for office, however numerous and from whatever source, have proved to be not only utterly unreliable and unsafe, but in many ways pernicious.*

(7) And that as a consequence there should be free public examinations for testing character and capacity, together with a rigid enforcement of the duty of the appointing officer to fill the vacancies by selecting those whose superior merit has been demonstrated by the examinations, without regard to political or religious opinions.

The provisions of the law and rules against making partisan henchmen of public officers, and for excluding politics and religion, as well as the whole theory of patronage and party aggrandizement, as the basis for appointments, are very specific. The second section of the act declares that "no person in the public service is under obligation to render any political service or to contribute to any political fund, and that he shall not be removed or prejudiced for refusing to do so." It further

*The ample knowledge and annoying experience of members of Congress in connection with recommendations gives great significance to the provisions of the Civil Service Act on this subject. The tenth section of the act is as follows:

"SECTION 10. 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.”

Those who believe in the sufficiency of recommendations for securing honest and efficient officers, or who expect the Commission to be influenced by their references to Members of Congress, will do well to reflect upon this significant provision. It is a solemn and authoritative declaration by the members themselves (indorsed by the President), that their own recommendations-sometimes extorted by pathetic importunity, but more frequently procured by false representations made by office beggars and patronage mongers-are not only untrustworthy, but are in their general influence so demoralizing and vicious that they must be suppressed by law. It would save Members of Congress much useless trouble, and avoid much delay and needless correspondence, if applicants would always address themselves directly to the Commission, and not assume that, in violation of law and duty, the Commissioners will be influenced by appeals to Congressional recommendations which they cannot eren receive. This, however, was not the first emphatic condemnation by Congress of recommendations and solicitations for office on the part of its members. Thirty-three years ago these evils had become so grave that Congress was compelled to seek a remedy and took the first steps toward substituting a merit system for a patronage system

declares that "no person in the service has a right to use his official authority or influence to coerce the political action of any person or body." The eighth rule is in the following language:

"No question in any examination, or proceeding by, or under, the Commission or examiners, shall call for the expression or disclosure of any political or religious opinion or affiliation; and if such opinion or affiliation be known, no discrimination shall be made by reason thereof by the examiners, the Commission, or the appointing power. The Commission and its examiners shall discountenance all disclosure, before either of them, of such opinion by or concerning any applicant for examination or by or concerning any one whose name is on any register awaiting appointment."

COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS.

The system of examinations provided for by the Civil Service Act is a competitive system. (See Act, section 2, and Rule 7, clause 5. Non-competitive, or what are usually called pass examinations are allowed only in very limited cases where some peculiar need of the public service exists or some exigency has arisen. More than ninety-eight per cent. of the examinations have been competitive.

Competitive examinations are those which are free and open, on the same terms, to all who are apparently qualified.*

Competitive examinations are those in which the relative merits of all persons seeking to enter the public service are put in comparison and the Government is enabled to ascertain and select the most meriby requiring examinations, to which further reference will be made. 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 solicitations, coming as they almost always do from deeply interested parties, could be accepted as reliable evidence. The first examinations in England 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 at the gates of entrance to the examinations. In 1853 and 1855 Congress followed the example of England by requiring the clerks in the Departments at Washington to be arranged in classes, and prohibited an appointment of those recommended even by themselves until after a pass examination. However high the recommendations made by members, and however earnest the solicitations made by friends, those laws (now R. S., sec. 164) inexorably required a real test of competency in the form of an examination before an examining board of three persons selected from the Department which the applicant was seeking to enter. Recommendations had been found utterly worthless. Members who signed them sometimes left standing directions at the Departments to disregard them!

*The conditions or qualifications are: that the applicants must be citizens of the United States, must be within the ages fixed by the rules (see Rules 11, 12, and 7 clause 5), and must have filled out and filed the formal application, &c., as the rules require. These conditions apply alike to competitive and to pass examinations.

torious. A pass examination is one in which it is ascertained whether some person selected from all the applicants can pass the minimum standard for entering the public service. It allows no chance for the others, who may be far more meritorious.

There seems to be an impression on the part of many that there is something technical or needlessly complicated or difficult about a competitive examination. This impression is wholly unfounded. The questions for competitive examinations are the same as for pass examinations. Competitive examinations, in fact, are those which, in the largest measure possible, are both just and free, altogether democratic and republican, and in the very spirit of our Constitutions and social life. They embody and carry into effect the fundamental conditions of the Civil Service Act which we have just considered. The consent of no officer, party, or person of influence is needed or can be of any use for entering them or going through them. They enable every applicant to show not only his own qualifications, but his merits as compared with those of all the competitors. They have no regard for recommenda tions and take no notice of political or religious opinions. Every ap plicant fixes his own relative standing by the record, in his own handwriting, which he makes for himself. The Government is enabled to take the most meritorious offering to work for the salary it tenders. On the basis of his self-made record alone his grade or relative merits for the public service and his just priority for an appointment are determined. Such a system absolutely makes the personal merit of ap plicants the test for appointments, and is, therefore, fitly designated "The Merit System." A public service made up of persons thus selected may fitly be called a "Merit Service," in contradistinction to a service selected on the basis of official favoritism and partisan recommendations.*

It is an important incidental advantage of competitive examinations, that every person graded in the scale of merit is interested to prevent each person graded above him from practicing any deception as to char acter, or securing any favor in marking. If he can show that one graded above him has gained by fraud or has a bad character, he may secure the unworthy competitor's displacement, by which he will be himself advanced. The scrutiny thus prompted by self-interest strongly tends to guarantee good character under a Merit Service.

*It is to be regretted that the phrase "Civil Service" is being used to express in a very indefinite if not absurd manner, both that "Merit System" and "Merit Service" which the Civil Service Act and Rules have established. The phrase "Merit System" has come into general use. The phrase "Civil Service,” fitly used only in contradistinction to the Military Service and the Naval Service, indicates nothing as between those in civil office before and since the Civil Service Act was passed, or as to the means by which either class gained office. When a person says he is in favor of "Civil Service," he makes a statement as inane, nonsensical, and needless as if he should state that he was in favor of government, of heat, or of the equator. But is he in favor of a "Merit Service"-of the Merit System by which it is secured—and consequently against the Spoils System?

But another incidental effect of competitive examinations is far more important. They say to every young man and woman wishing to enter the public service: "The conditions of success are with yourself. The Government has sole regard to character and capacity. All party considerations are waived in deference to merit. You must merit what you seek, and win your own way to it by showing that you, above all other applicants, most deserve it. An upright, untarnished character, against which no rival can sustain a charge, united with excellence in that knowledge taught in the public schools, which is deemed so useful that all the people are taxed to secure it, and not favor or recommendations, will carry you through these examinations and through the gates of the public service to which they open the way. No degrading work of partisanship, no fawning before the great men of politics, no servility to party, no flattery of high officials, nothing unmanly or unwomanly can aid you. On the other hand, no manly avowal of your political or religious opinions, no honest work for your party, no independent assertion of your rights as a voter-though against the threats of party leaders and the interest of powerful candidates-can bar you from these examinations or defeat the claim you may thereby establish.* Parties are both inevitable and useful, but they should rest on principle and not on patronage."

It hardly need be mentioned that these conditions and effects of competitive examinations have made them in the highest degree obnoxious to the patronage mongers and scheming politicians to whose selfish plans they are fatal. The candidate for election who is ready to promise places in return for votes secured and work done for himself is by no means satisfied when he finds he can only advise his protégés to go into an examination freely open to them, without aid, and where influence is unavailing. High executive officers who wish to give places to their relatives, dependents, and favorites are no better pleased with such suppression of their long-enjoyed patronage. All the 15,000 places subject to examinations are thus lost for bribery and gained for merit. On the other hand, every patriotic and conscientious officer having any part of the appointing power is, like the President, glad to see merit gain its just reward, and to be relieved from the clamorous, greedy patronage-mongers "who impudently stand between the people and the machinery of their Government."

*For example: Mr. Owen Kellar, a Republican from Ohio, who had always frankly declared his politics, and in a manly way had served his party, gained a high grade in a competitive examination. He was certified for appointment to Secretary Manning in June last, and was notified in due form by the Appointment Clerk of the Treasury Department to come to Washington and take the place he had won. On his arrival he found a combination of partisans, some in high office, formed to keep him out. He was charged with being an offensive Republican, and his private life was aspersed. Secretary Manning declared in no uncertain language that the Civil Service Rules should be strictly enforced, and promptly gave Mr. Kellar his place. He has now served out his six months probation and has been given the permanent appointment which his merits deserved.

Nothing in the reform movement is so remarkable-nothing so forcibly illustrates the effect of ignorance and prejudice, aided by false representations in a partisan press--as the facts that competitive examinations-being, as they are, the methods of common justice, the expression of the true spirit of our institutions, the ally of the public schools, the essential condition of enabling manhood and merit to gain appointments-should by so many be regarded as unjust, complicated, aristocratic, and foreign in spirit and aim.*

PASS-EXAMINATIONS.

When kept within the narrow limits contemplated by the Civil Service Act and Rules, pass-examinations may be made useful. There are

*These examinations are so important as to justify some reference to their history. Between 1872 and 1875 there was a Civil Service Commission appointed by President Grant, and competitive examinations, which, resting upon his authority and upon a meager provision in an appropriation act, were conducted under many embarrassments. But members of Congress were not then prepared to surrender their patronage. In 1874 and 1875 appropriations in aid of the reform were refused, although the President, in messages, requested appropriations for continuing them, and declared that the results of the competitive system thus far had been to improve the public service, and that he believed they could be made still more beneficial. Though refusing the appropriation, Congress, even in that period of reaction, did not repeal the clause in the appropriation act nor the laws requiring pass-examinations. The consequence was that the pass-examinations were resumed, and members of Congress again succeeded to the greater share of the old monopoly of designating those who could be examined.

The success of that abandoned experiment led to the enforcement of competitive examinations at the custom-house and post office of New York City (where they had before been tried in a qualified form) under rules made by President Hayes. They were enforced at those offices until the passage of the Civil Service Act, and selections for appointment were made from among those standing highest in the competitions. So quickly were the good effects apparent that the annual message of the President for 1880 strongly commended them to the consideration of Congress. Congressmen were not ready to give up their patronage. The same beneficial results have continued.

For more than sixteen years competitive examinations, based on a much longer trial in a limited sphere, have been enforced, with great public advantage, throughout the administrative service of Great Britain and British India. The intrinsic difficulties attending their first enforcement in Great Britain were far greater than with us, for the reason that such examinations are repugnant to the exclusive spirit and class distinction of an aristocracy.

The effect of the introduction of the merit system into the British Civil Service was in the highest degree favorable both to popular education and to liberal principles. Indeed, the movement for establishing that system in Great Britain was largely a contest between those, on one side, who stood for the old aristocratic patronage monopoly of appointments enjoyed for centuries by the rich and the high-born, and those, on the other side, who stood for the just claims of character and capacity in humble life. After speaking of the advantages of that system in other respects, Sir Charles Trevelyan, than whom no one is better informed on the subject, in a letter to one of the members of this Commission, says: "The same change which has increased the efficiency of the civil and military services has given a marvelous stimulus to education.