ney for the association and two cases are now pending in the local courts which will determine certain legal questions that are giving trouble.

For the coming year a campaign of education throughout western Pennsylvania is planned and arrangements are already perfected for several addresses by officers of the association before civic organizations of the county.

Hon. George H. Herst, of the Pittsburgh Civil Service Commission, supplemented the report of the Allegheny County Association as follows:

I am happy to state that I bring to this great national gathering of the true friends and chief sponsors of genuine civil service reform, a message of good cheer from the industrial metropolis of the world, Pittsburgh.

The civil service act governing the city went into effect on July 1st, 1907. It was not, however, until late in September of that year that the city civil service commission was organized and began its work. The city, at the time, was governed by a reform administration, at the head of which was Mayor George W. Guthrie, nationally known as one of the foremost advocates of civil service reform. The commission, of which I was a member, had a herculean task to perform. It not only had to prescribe the rules and regulations, but had also to deal with a multitude of applicants who, ignorant of the real meaning of the law, thought that it would result in the immediate filling of all the positions in the city by those who passed the necessary examinations. As a matter of fact, all who held office at the time the law went into effect were protected from removal except under its provisions. As a consequence, only such positions were filled in which vacancies occurred by death, resignation, or removal for cause, or by the creation of new positions. Owing, however, to the business depression, which was felt more severely in Pittsburgh than in any other community in the nation, thousands of men were thrown out of employment as laborers, for a number of whom the city undertook to provide work by special appropriation. As a result, the commission received ten thousand applications for employment in one week. The total number received aggregated thirty thousand.

The commission, during Mayor Guthrie's administration, held examinations for many positions and created a large number of eligible lists. The number of persons on these eligible lists, exclusive of labor lists, aggregated twenty-seven hundred and seventy. In December, 1907, the city of Allegheny was incorporated with Pittsburgh and the civil service commissions of the two cities were united. This fact largely increased the work of the commission and also complicated the problems with which it had to deal.

On April 5, 1909, Mayor Guthrie was succeeded as the chief executive of the city by Hon. William A. Magee. Mr. Magee was the regular Republican candidate and there were those, not a few, including some of the earnest friends of civil service reform, who predicted that his advent would witness a radical change for the worse in the execution of the civil service law. All such forebodings and predictions have, however, been discredited by the actual happenings of the last eight months. Prior to his election, Mr. Magee pledged himself to an honest enforcement of the civil service law, and this pledge has been nobly kept. The personnel of the commission was changed by him, the only member of the old commission remaining being myself. The new commission revised the rules adopted by its predecessors, but only in a few particulars. It increased the exempt list and the non-competitive list in an aggregate of about thirty names, these changes being approved, I may say, by the civil service reform association of our city which, after the work of the commission in amending the rules was concluded, through their attorney, appeared before the commission and made the following statement:

"Mr. President, I appear as the Secretary of the Civil Service Association of Allegheny County. Last week I handed a list of the proposed exemptions to the executive committee of the Association and they directed the officers of the Association to attend this meeting and to state that they approved them all, and also to commend the commission on not having enlarged the number of exemptions. We appreciate very much the absolute fairness with which the whole matter has been investigated

and these exemptions made, the executive committee approving without a dissenting vote."

Mayor Magee, at the very beginning of his administration, informed the commission that he desired it to enforce the law and he has sustained it in doing so. My two colleagues, Mr. Chester D. Potter, who is president of the commission, and Mr. John B. Townley, are both regular Republicans and well known newspaper men of Pittsburgh. Their effort has uniformly been to fairly and honestly enforce the law. That this has been accomplished may be clearly seen from the fact that since Mayor Magee took office there have only been fiftytwo persons discharged from city positions. The new commission has instituted some important reforms, which the experience gained by their predecessors showed to be advisable, so that I have no hesitation in saying that the civil service law in our city is now better executed under the administration of Mayor Magee than it was under that of his predecessor.

Those questions which have been receiving much consideration at the hands of the commission, and which they are still seeking proper solution for, are those of promotion, leaves of absence, and the proper keeping of an efficiency record. I might add that while naturally there has been and still is much opposition to the civil service law, from party leaders and their followers who hoped that this administration would ignore the law and provide offices for a multitude of people, and this feeling was at first shared in by some city officials, yet that this feeling now counts for less each day, for it is rapidly being learned that the law is being honestly enforced and that those who desire city positions must follow the course prescribed by it. City officials also who have appointments to make have discovered that the law is their greatest protector against the hordes of claimants for office whose demands it would be impossible for them to satisfy, and such officials are being converted from active opponents of the law into friends, or at least into passive acquiescents with its provisions. Therefore, I end as I began, by stating that I bring a message of good cheer to the friends of real civil service

reform, from the great city which I have the honor to represent.

In lieu of the report from the Civil Service Reform Association of Buffalo, Hon. Francis Almy, one of the members of the Buffalo Civil Service Commission, reported on the work of that commission as follows:

The most important work of the Buffalo Commission this year has been the putting of 35 more positions in the competitive class,-19 of these positions having heretofore been exempt, 7 qualifying and 9 labor. We have also put 10 positions heretofore exempt into the qualifying class, and 12 labor positions into this class also. The competitive class now includes almost all the higher clerical positions, including cashiers and paymasters in the different departments, almost all positions in the Law Department, and many positions styled "foreman" the duties of which are supervising and inspecting the labor of others. A number of assistant foremen have been changed from the labor to the qualifying class, and now have to undergo a non-competitive oral examination.

We are doing a little more each year with oral examinations, for positions where temperament is of importance. In an examination for police captains this year, the police commissioners especially asked us to consider in our examinations the personality and presence of the men, saying that they had to do this in their appointments, and that it would save them considerable annoyance and friction if we could take it into account in the eligible lists. We had the candidates appear in full uniform, had them march singly the length of a long hall to a platform where our commission sat, and had each answer a few questions. We have used oral examinations (always as auxiliary examinations only) also for the positions of tuberculosis inspector, probation officer, and court attendant, and expect to do so for managing clerk of the law department.

We give practical examinations where we can to advantage. In a recent examination for stokers we took the men out on the fire tugs and made them stoke the fires and answer various practical questions. For police and fire drivers we have made the men hitch up and drive the

horses; for steam firing we have examined men in the boiler room of the great Ellicott Square office building, while to get workers for the city forester we have set men to climbing trees and cutting branches high in the air. Our aim is to find what the appointing officer needs, and then to find the best men we can for his needs, by whatever seems in each case the best method of procedure.

Mr. Charles G. Morris submitted the report from the Civil Service Reform Association of Connecticut:

The chief function of the Connecticut Civil Service Reform Association appears to the unwary to be to eat dinners, but when it is known that the Association had an existence in embryo or larval form of 22 years before it ate anything, a fair appetite for annual dinners on emergence therefrom is not to be wondered at. We have been requested by a member who has taken part neither in our work nor in our play to change the name to the Society for Applied Gastronomy. If we did nothing but eat, we should accept his suggestion with thanks, but in a land where practical politics is so closely associated with a full dinner pail and a tight waistband, why should we, who are trying to improve practical politics, go lean and hungry and so demonstrate an apparent inferiority. to the practicing politician. It is answer enough to this thoughtless critic that in the 22 years of fasting we secured only a very willowy civil service clause in the New Haven charter, while after but five dinners we have succeeded in starching that clause (if one may starch the willow) and in giving the judiciary committee of the legislature some very uncomfortable moments, trying to find the easiest way to set us aside. They did consider it right to dissemble their love, but they did not follow the example of Father William further and proceed to kick us downstairs.

And with our eating we have waxed strong. We have members representing us in a third of the towns in the state and we have found the legislative committee intelligent in our discussions before it. Sooner or later the merit system will be as much a matter of course in Connecticut as the trolley and the automobile.

Last winter by legislative enactment New Haven suc