the power of a public official to abuse the authority entrusted to him." It might have this effect, if it could be enforced. At present, however, in the city of Philadelphia, the politicians are encouraging their followers to regard the Shern Act, with its prohibition of political activity on the part of office-holders, as a page of dead and forgotten legislation. Mayor Reyburn, we are told, a few weeks ago advised a ward leader who brought him a copy of the act, to crumple it up and throw it in the waste basket and not "bother" about it further. "I suppose," said the Mayor, "that the employees of the city know what the law is, and I suppose they will obey it."

In the Department of Public Works on August 29, Director Stearns called for the resignation of over one hundred persons, the working corps of two entire bureaus, that he might discharge them at pleasure without falling foul of the civil service regulation which provides that specific reason shall be rendered for dismissal. In the Department of Public Safety, Director Clay continues to discharge civil service appointees "for the good of the service" and to reinstate the so-called "martyrs of 1905," followers of the "gang" who were dismissed by Mayor Weaver during the reform upheaval. To the representations of the Civil Service Reform Association no answer is returned, and of the director's high-handed actions no explanation is vouchsafed. The administration is a law unto itself.

In September, 1902, Willam R. Knight, Jr., by means of worse than prize-ring tactics broke up a convention of the so-called Union Party at Musical Fund Hall in Philadelphia. As his reward, the Republican organization of Philadelphia secured for Knight the appointment as Shipping Commissioner of the Port of Philadelphia. From this office, as you have learned in the annual report submitted for the Pennsylvania Association by Mr. Burnham, he was last August removed for pernicious political activity. In the hearing before Commissoner Greene, Knight defiantly asserted his right to do as he pleased in the way of partisan politics, outside of office hours. "If Roosevelt and Taft can go around the country electioneering in their own behalf, I don't see why I, Bill Knight,

can't play my own humble part in politics here in Philadelphia. I always have been active in politics and I always intend to be. Somebody's got to do this work. It was men like me that elected Roosevelt." After Knight was removed by the Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor, Mayor Reyburn publicly declared, "We've got to find Bill Knight a job. The butcher and the baker and the iceman are coming around, and he needs the money." Whereupon the discredited federal official was given a four thousand dollar position under the city, with large possiblities in the way of distribution of patronage, whenever the spirit or the letter of the civil service act can be circumvented. I need not add that Knight not merely takes but makes frequent occasion to denounce the civil service system, and to laud, magnify, and honor the ward politician as among the greatest benefactors of the

race.

The case of the Civil Service Reform Association vs. the present administration of the city government in Philadelphia has little to offer in the way of novel phases for the student of civil service reform. It is the same old mean and miserable story of a corrupt political organization allowed by the negligence and indifference of the cultured minority to achieve an ascendency over the ignorant majority of citizens. The social ostracism of the political leaders of Philadelphia,-the fact that a great gulf of social cleavage yawns between Rittenhouse Square and West Logan Square,-is not going to affect Philadelphian's civic regeneration. The "organization" rejoices when, as occasionally happens, it wins over to its ranks a reputable person, just as the monkey-people in Kipling's story made merry over the capture of the man-cub Mowgli. But in the main the "gang" is content to let the better element of Philadelphia run the Browning Society and the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, if only it may run the City Hall. They care not who makes the songs of the people, if only they may make the laws, and appoint the office-holders.

It is scarcely worth while, perhaps, to collate the expressions of the Mayor which indicate the present temper

of the administration toward civil service statutes. His views are not always expressed with Addisonian elegance his literary model may have been Bill Devery. "Those civil service rules give me a pain every time I look at them." "We intend to obey the law, but we will not do any more than we have to." "They have an eligible list up there, but I would like to wipe it all out." Not until he had held office three months, we are told, did Mayor Reyburn read the civil service act of March 5. 1906, and then he said, "It made me very sleepy before I got half-way through with it." But what the Mayor has to say anent the civil service law, and the rules framed thereunder or thereover, is not so significant as what he does. It is his avowed intention to defeat the real purposes of the act by setting aside the eligible list whenever possible. Under the proviso that there shall be exemption from examination in certain cases where expert technical qualifications are demanded, it is apparently the Mayor's intention to secure the appointment not merely of bureau heads, but of ordinary inspectors whose chief qualifications for office would appear to be their activity in ward politics. The more important appointments are invariably made after consultation with one or more of the quintet of contractor-politicians who are, as they say in Philadelphia, "in cahoots" to dominate affairs at the City Hall and to share the proceeds. The Mayor is merely one more example of a man put in office by a political organization, frankly acknowledging his indebtedness to that organization, and openly conceding that it is his intention to comply with their desires in making appointments which he calls his own. They have a political anthem which has been set to music for the brass band and which is sung on great political occasions, such as a dinner to a newly appointed Assistant Director. The words of the anthem are: "Hail, hail, the gang's all here. What the hell do we care? What the hell do we care?"— Such, ladies and gentlemen, is the political situation at present in Philadelphia.

Prospects for Civil Service Reform in
Michigan.

HON. JOHN A. FAIRLIE.

What I have to say will come as a decided anti-climax to the much more interesting and exciting address to which you have just been listening, for two reasons: On the one hand, political conditions in Michigan have not reached so low a state of depravity as to call forth the picturesque language of the gentleman from Philadelphia. On the other hand, and perhaps because existing conditions are tolerable, there is no urgent demand for civil service reform, and the prospects for the near future are not encouraging. But the informal remarks I have to make will at least have the merit of brevity, and will not detain you long at this late hour.

There have been a few efforts to secure civil service laws in Michigan, most of them for the city of Detroit. The first of these seems to have been in 1899-before I was a resident of Michigan-when a bill to apply the merit system in Detroit, similar to the law in force in Chicago, was introduced by one of the local representatives, David E. Heineman. But this measure had no organized support, and was not seriously considered.

At the next session of the legislature, in 1901, Representative J. E. Bland, of Detroit, introduced, at the request of the Detroit Municipal League, another and less. drastic measure, including some features of the Massachusetts law. This bill was referred to a committee and discussed to some extent. But this legislature was notorious for the passage of a series of "ripper bills," reorganizing the city government of Detroit for purely political purposes; and no reform measure could be expected from a body subject to the influences which secured the passage of these bills.

At the election two years later, the Detroit Municipal

League made the question of civil service reform one of the local issues, by asking candidates for the legislature and the common council their position on the subject. After election, another bill was prepared, recommended by the council committee on charter (of which former Representative Heineman was then chairman, and endorsed by the common council. The local delegation in the legislature also voted to support the measure, to which had been added a referendum clause; and under these circumstances there seemed to be some prospects of success. The bill passed the house of representatives in the closing days of the session; but it did not commend itself to the more cautious senate, which has stood in the way of many other measures of reform in Michigan.

At the next election the question was again made a local issue, and in the legislature of 1905 another bill was introduced and at the very end of the session was finally passed by both houses. But the bill as introduced was quietly amended before passage, so as to require the appointing officer always to select the person standing highest on any eligible list. This feature was objected to, and on this ground the Governor vetoed the bill. There seemed ground to suspect that the amend ment was inserted in the bill simply for the purposes of having an excuse to have the bill killed.

Once more, in 1906, the Detroit candidates for the legislature pledged themselves in favor of a civil service reform law; and at the legislative session of 1907, a number of bills were prepared. In the senate there was introduced by Senator Bland of Detroit a bill providing for the merit system applied to all appointments and promotions in the civil services of the state, cities and counties, under the supervision of a state commission. This bill followed largely the views of the National Civil Service Reform League as represented in a bill then before the New Jersey legislature. It did not, however, make any progress toward passage.

In the house two bills for the city of Detroit were introduced. One was the measure prepared under the direction of the Detroit Municipal League and endorsed by that body, providing in considerable detail for the or