officer must serve. In one of our country districts, where the official must perform his duty in the eyes of an intelligent and virtuous people, where every act is likely to be known and criticised by the whole constituency, the chances will be greatly in favor of securing good officers; but in the great cities, where individuality is lost in the greatness of the mass, and in the Indian country where no civilized community exists and the officer is left to his own conscience and the mere forms of law, the whole country knows how impotent our system has been to secure satisfactory results.

Of course there must have been some redeeming influences, or we should long ago have been reduced to anarchy. Such checks upon extreme demoralization have been found in the fact that there has always been in Congress a goodly number of men who were in earnest in trying to serve their country, and that not only have the Presidents and Cabinet officers been generally men of good purposes, but from their very situation they have had some interest in preventing the civil service from becoming as inefficient as our unfortunate system would permit, or at least in diminishing the grossest abuses of the use of influence and patronage. Thus it has generally turned out that the heads of departments, however ardent politicians themselves, have sooner or later been found growing conservative on the question of appointments and removals; and even if they continue to admit the general theory of the congressional distribution of patronage, they have tried to limit its practice, to hold on to tried and competent subordinates, and to yield slowly when they must yield to the clamor for the "general sweep" of which the public hears so much.

These saving influences are only palliatives, however, and temper the evils of which we complain only in the unsatisfactory way that some Oriental despotisms have been wittily said to be tempered by assassination.

What, then, is the remedy? It is to apply to the civil service, completely and thoroughly, the plain principles of common business administration; to separate the public offices, absolutely and forever, from all favoritism, nepotism, and "influence"; to declare patronage in all its forms to be antirepublican and dangerous to the state; to find and practise VOL. CXII. NO. 230. 7

upon a principle of selection for office which shall give every citizen of the country a perfectly equal chance to prove his capacity and fitness for the public service; and to obtain a position in it when he has made the proof, with thorough independence of President, secretary, or congressman, and simply and solely because of his citizenship and his fitness. It is further, to adopt in the permanent civil service a tenure of office during good behavior, with the hope of rising to the highest grades of the routine service by industry and strict devotion to duty.

In brief, the principle to be adopted is, admission to the civil service only upon the results of a competitive examination open to all, and dismission only upon ascertained failure of capacity or character.

There should be no attempt to disguise the fact that it is the purpose of this theory of administration to prevent the civil service being used in any manner or to any extent as a means of party success, except as a thoroughly good and business-like administration would itself commend to popular favor the party which should practise it.

Perhaps as good a statement of this view as we could make would be to say that the administration of the public business and the selection and discipline of the routine officers must no longer be regarded as a means in politics at all, but an end at which political effort should as distinctly aim as at a proper system of imposts and internal taxes. Until an entirely satisfactory system is reached, no other question in political economics should be regarded as superior to it, because no other affects more vitally the pecuniary interests of the people, or the success and stability of real republicanism in our government. We should no more admit that the routine civil offices of the government can properly be made a political fund for the purchase of party success or the reward of partisan effort, than we should that the revenues, when collected, should be used for the same purpose. The civil service cannot be made a party cash-fund to secure the revenue system which the party advocates, any more than the taxes can be used in the same way on the plea that the party is seeking to secure a good civil service. Whatever change of form the proposition

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may take, nothing less radical than this will meet the difficulty and correct the abuse.

Let us look for a moment at the several elements of the principle above enounced as the true rule for the civil-service organization, viz. admission only upon competitive examinations open to all, and dismission only upon ascertained failure of capacity or character.

Perhaps enough has already been said upon the necessity of making the examinations competitive. The authority of Mill has been quoted as to the worthlessness of any mere "pass examination; but in view of the fact that England has already made a successful effort to reform her own service upon the principles which that eminent man has laid down, a further extract from his treatise may be proper. He says it is "absolutely necessary that the examinations should be competitive, and the appointments given to those who are most successful." As an example of the comparative results of the two methods of examination, even when free from political influence and intrigue, he refers to Oxford and Cambridge, saying: "Examinations for degrees at the two great universities have generally been as slender in their requirements as those for honors are trying and serious." Applying the principle to all public

examinations, he sums up as follows:

“When, on the contrary, the appointments are given to those, among a great number of candidates, who most distinguish themselves, and when the successful competitors are classed in order of merit, not only each is stimulated to do his very utmost, but the influence is felt in every place of liberal education throughout the country. It becomes with every schoolmaster an object of ambition and an avenue to success to have furnished pupils who have gained a high place in these competitions, and there is hardly any other mode in which the state can do so much to raise the quality of educational institutions throughout the country."-Rep. Gov., Ch. XIV.

Apart from the weight of so decisive an authority, our own experience proves the necessity of making examinations competitive, because, in spite of the law requiring a general examination, our practice has notoriously and undeniably become no better than if no examination whatever were required. A spasmodic effort to make the examination mean something

may be made when public sentiment is for the moment aroused; but he must be dull indeed who does not see that when the mere scratch of a pen of the head of a department or a bureau may decide in favor of an applicant influentially supported, and nobody be at all the wiser for it, there is no security at all against a return at any moment to the most undisguised forms of office jobbing. Attempts to uphold any form of mere pass examination, therefore, should be treated as a device of the enemies of a true civil-service system to avoid an issue which cannot be fairly faced.

As far as the experience of any of our own departments and bureaus has gone, the evidence is most decisive as to the value of the competitive system. The condition of the Patent Office, at the termination of Commissioner Fisher's recent connection with it, may be confidently appealed to as demonstrative proof of what we are asserting. The class of younger officers admitted under competitive examinations is doing much more and much better work than has been usually accomplished by men of similarly brief experience in the office. No one could become even superficially acquainted with the organization of that important bureau without seeing that a spirit of emulation and zeal in their work had taken the place of a listless and negligent performance of duty. A single fact may be mentioned as being an experienee almost if not quite unique in the history of department administration at Washington for the last forty years. During the past year the place of one of the principal examiners of patents became vacant, the salary being twentyfive hundred dollars, and the place regarded one of the most desirable in the Interior Department. The Commissioner of Patents announced that it would be filled by a competitive examination among the first assistants; and such was the general understanding of the firmness with which the system would be adhered to, that not a single application for the position was made either to the Commissioner or the head of the department during some three months that it remained open.

The objection is often made by those who have given the subject a very superficial consideration, that the successful competitors in these examinations will usually be boys fresh from school or college, and that older and better men who have

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become "rusty" in their school knowledge will fail. answers to this are conclusive. One is that the examinations in every well-regulated system are so ordered that the specific knowledge most used in the bureau itself is that which counts for most in the competition. The general education of the applicant is tested, and the only conceivable method of doing that must be, as Mill has remarked, to examine him upon the topics of a general education. But this is so conducted as to call out his special fitness for the place he seeks, if he has it. Thus, in the Census Office, as we shall presently see, the test part of the examination runs mostly into arithmetic, and the computations in numbers which form the basis of statistical compilation. In the Patent Office, the principles of mechanics, hydrostatics, and hydraulics counted for more. This is well shown by the report of the competitive examination for the place of chief assistants in the Patent Office in 1869, and of which the results were given by the Commissioner in his general report for that year. One hundred questions were put to the candidates, the questions being counted equally in the grading of merit. Of these ten were upon general exercises, like the drafting of business letters, preparation of papers, penmanship, etc.; ten were upon geography and astronomy; seven were upon history; fifteen were upon mathematics and the principles of mechanical drawing; twenty were upon patent law and the practice of the bureau; and thirty-eight were in physical philosophy. It is therefore evident that the applicant might fail in nearly every part of his examination but the two last divisions, and that his rustiness in history or geography need not exclude him if he were well prepared in things most germane to his duties.

But a still more conclusive answer is the statement of the actual result of the examination, showing that it was not the school-boys who carried off the prizes, nor yet always those who had had most experience in the office. In two examinations of classes of seventeen and twenty-four competitors respectively, four were appointed from the head of each list. The following table, which is taken from the annual report of the Commissioner, shows the age and the most significant facts in the history of the successful men, illustrating the working