The Baltimore Charter Commission and the Merit System.

HON. W. CABELL BRUCE, MEMBER OF THE BALTIMORE CHARTER COMMISSION.

By an ordinance, approved in July, 1909, the mayor of Baltimore was empowered to appoint, subject to the confirmation of the second branch of the city council, a commission of nine persons to revise the existing city charter. Pursuant to the authority thus conferred, Mayor Mahool named as the members of the commission Messrs. Edwin G. Baetjer, Louis M. Duvall, George R. Gaither, B. Howell Griswold, Junior, David Hutzler, Waldo Newcomer, Joseph Packard, Dr. William H. Welch and myself. All of the appointments were confirmed, and shortly afterwards the commission elected Mr. Packard as its chairman and Dr. Horace E. Flack, the executive officer of the municipal department of legislative reference, as its secretary, and at once entered actively upon the discharge of its duties. Naturally enough its sessions were marked by considerable conflict of opinion with reference to many of the changes in the organic law of the city suggested in the course of its deliberations; but it is gratifying to recall that one of the things upon which the members of the commission were absolutely unanimous was the vital importance to any large and enlightened plan of municipal reform of the merit system of appointment. So matured and positive were their convictions upon this subject that, when an elaborate amendment to the existing city charter was submitted to them, providing for the application of the merit system to the city government, they promptly agreed that the principle of the amendment was too manifestly sound and timely to require reference to a committee, and contented themselves with an examination by the commission as a whole of the administrative details of the new system.

After some modifications, mainly adopted with a view to rendering the system as secure from encroachment as possible, in case it became a feature of the city charter, the amendment was approved without a dissenting voice and made a part of the general revision which the commission subsequently laid before the state legislature. The text was originally drafted by the practised hand of Mr. William Reynolds, of Baltimore, and of it, in its final form, it is sufficient to say that it appeared to comprise every essential of a complete civil service reform law. It created a city service commission of three persons, clothed these persons with the amplest powers of classification and regulation, made fitness ascertained by open competition the one condition of admission to practically all the subordinate positions under the city government, including the police department, the board of liquor license commissioners, and the offices of the clerks of the courts, and prescribed all the usual safeguards against the assertion of political or other perverting influences over appointments to such positions.

The considerations by which the commission was actuated in recommending the establishment of the merit system are briefly expressed in the report made to the mayor by it after its revision had been completed. "This system," it said, "if established, would, in our judgment. prove most effective in excluding political influence from the workings of the city administration, in suppressing the worst abuses of municipal patronage and jobbery, and in opening up to the people of the city generally new opportunities for honorable and profitable employment now too often denied them by the oligarchical nature of the spoils system of politics.'

The bill embodying all the extensive alterations in the existing city charter recommended by the commission was introduced into the house of delegates in March of the present year, and was referred to the city delegation. Two brief hearings were accorded to the commission by this delegation, and after some indecision and much unwarrantable, if not artful, delay the bill found its way back into the house. There a conflict arose between the members of the city delegation who favored the bill and

those who opposed it which afforded a member of the house from Baltimore County an opportunity to have the bill laid on the table; his pretext being that the discussion over it in the closing hours of the session was obstructing the progress of other important legislation. In this catastrophe the provisions in the bill for the merit. system were, of course, involved.

That the death of the bill was, except so far as referable to the abolition which it contemplated of one branch. of the city council, referable solely to the lethal blow struck by it at the spoils system of appointment and all its debasing and despicable attributes no well informed person in Maryland doubts. The men who framed this bill, it should be recollected, were not a self-constituted commission. They brought to the five months of earnest and devoted labor which they gave to their task credentials more valid than any with which they could have been furnished by any civil service reform association however respectable, or even by a popular movement outside of the domain of official responsibility. They were appointed under the authority of a formal ordinance of the mayor and city council of Baltimore by a mayor whose disregard of secondary considerations in making comment can be trusted, they seem to have been accepted by the great mass of their fellow citizens as fairly answering the requirement of the ordinance that the nine individuals, who were to serve without pay as members of the commission, should be "able and discreet" persons. Their appointment was confirmed by one of the two branches of the municipal legislature. If contemporary appointments is one among his many titles to respect. Their disinterestedness and public spirit were never questioned. The revision drafted by them was received with distinct favor by the press and the people. As a whole it was subjected to singularly little criticism. By its terms it was to be submitted to the voters of Baltimore for their approval before taking effect. Under such circumstances it is hardly probable that such a bill as that of the commission would have been defeated, even though it did. trench upon some vested political interests in lopping off one branch of the City Council, but for the fact that the

honest face of the merit system, reflected in its pages, aroused in the political bosses, who controlled a large portion, if not the majority, of the city delegation in the house, somewhat the same feelings of mingled disgust and terror as those with which Mephistopheles shrinks on the stage from the sight of the cross. It was unquestionably to their secret and persuasive promptings that the shifting relations sustained by many members of the city delegation in the house to the bill are to be ascribed. At times some of these delegates appeared disposed to heed the popular desire for a new charter, at other times they rested their doubts upon the pretence that the bill had reached them too late in the session for intelligent action. and on one occasion the deportment of one or more of them towards the chairman of the commission was reported in the press as devoid of even common courtesy.

"As the prompter breathes, the puppet speaks." This line of Pope sums up all that is to be said about the individuals who should be handed down in the history of Baltimore as men who, to their lasting discredit, were supposed to represent her best interests at an hour when she was anxious to make another stride along the pathway of her high destiny and who yet did not scruple by their votes to deny to her people the privilege of passing upon the means by which her generous aspirations could be fulfilled.

If the defeat of the merit system at the last session of the general assembly of Maryland was all that there was to be told, it would hardly be worth the telling. That is but the fate which every general proposition of the sort has incurred in this state at the hands of its legislature, but in this instance the disaster was attended by circumstances which justify the expectation that the application of the merit system to all subordinate positions under the city government in Baltimore will not be much longer postponed; and this notwithstanding the fact that I fully realize that the patronage system is the very last thing upon which the iron fingers of any well organized political machine can ever be induced to relax their clutch. John Randolph, of Roanoke, referring to his feeble digestive organs, is said to have declared on one occasion

that to ask him to dine on a certain dish was to ask him for a slice of his constitution. That is the kind of request we make when we ask the spoils politicians in Baltimore to give up the spoils system of official tenure. But, unless I am very much mistaken, if the mass of our people will but do their duty next spring and next fall in relation to the proposed city charter, it will not be long before our cannibalistic cravings, already supplied with some substantial gratifications that were once thought to be wholly beyond their reach, will be gratified in this particular too. The entire history of the proposed city charter shows that the merit system now has a wholly different standing in Baltimore from any that it has ever had in the past. It is no longer little more than a mere cult. It is no longer even simply an earnest creed, cherished by a comparatively few unselfish and resolute men, and not only detested by the machine politician but misunderstood and disparaged by thousands of conscientious and public-spirited citizens as well. A few years ago no man who had the slightest leanings in favor of such a system could have been a member of a Baltimore city charter commission at all. Even the charter commission of 1898, superior in many respects as its quality was, did not venture to recommend the application of any such system to anything but the public schools. The members of the recent commission were not selected with any reference to the system at all. Yet how significant it is that when they came together from the many different fields of activity from which they were drawn they were as one man in expressing their sense of the paramount value of the system to the proper government of cities and in believing that the time had come for pointedly asking the people through all the ordinary agencies of popular agitation whether they were willing to be any longer robbed of its benefits by a group of political bosses who are no more a natural part of a sound body politic than a group of malignant bacilli are a natural part of a healthy human organism! And how much in this community at any rate is the significance of these facts enhanced when it is remembered that at least three of the members of the commission, Mr. Packard, a former president of our