Page images
PDF
EPUB

saries soon learned that they were now forced to fight a man as skilful as themselves in all the arts of war or diplomacy, who lacked neither mental nor physical courage, and who, moreover, had truth on his side.

How fierce and constant that battle was can best be judged by Mr. Roosevelt's three capital essays, "Machine Politics in New York City," "Six Years of Civil Service Reform," and "Administering the New York Police Force." Even these give but a faint idea of the work done by Mr. Roosevelt and his colleagues in their efforts to make effective the laws looking toward purity in politics and in getting new legislation to assist in extending and completing the work.

Mr. Roosevelt's attitude toward civil service and the urgent need of it is succinctly set forth in the opening of his essay on that subject. "No question of internal administration" he declares, "is so important to the United States as the question of Civil Service reform, because the spoils system, which can be supplanted only through the agencies which have found expression in the act creating the Civil Service Commission, has been for seventy years the most potent of all the forces tending to bring about the

degradation of our politics. No republic can permanently endure when its politics are corrupt and base; and the spoils system, the application in political life of the degrading doctrine that to the victor belong the spoils, produces corruption and degradation. The man who is in politics for the offices might just as well be in politics for the money he can get for his vote, so far as the general good is concerned. The worst

enemies of the republic are the demagogue and the corruptionist. The spoils-monger and the spoils-seeker invariably breed the bribe-taker and the bribe-giver, the embezzler of public funds and the corrupter of voters. Civil Service reform is not merely a movement to better the public service. It achieves this end too; but its main purpose is to raise the tone of public life, and it is in this direction that its effects have been of incalculable good to the whole community."

Mr. Roosevelt in this essay goes on to show exactly what was done during the six years he served as a member of the board, both to advance the law and to hinder its advancement, and who were the more prominent among its friends and foes. It is a paper well worth the

study of any one desirous of knowing how the few really honest and capable men in the public service must fight to keep the spoilsmen from overrunning the rightful possessions of the general public, and carrying off its substance to be divided among the successful marauders. Here, as in all his chronicles of events in which he has taken active part, Mr. Roosevelt is quick to bring forward those who have been active and resolute in the cause.

When Mr. Roosevelt took office on the Commission the only commissioner was Charles Lyman, of Connecticut, with whom he served until he resigned in May, 1895, to accept the position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Hugh S. Thompson, ex-governor of South Carolina, was made commissioner at the same time with Mr. Roosevelt and served three years, when he resigned, and was succeeded by George D. Johnson, of Louisiana, who was removed by the President in November, 1893, being replaced by John R. Proctor, the former State geologist of Kentucky. Mr. Roosevelt declares that the Commission never varied a hand's breadth from its course throughout the six years of his service, and that Messrs. Thompson, Proctor, Lyman

and himself were always a unit on all important questions of policy and principle. "Our aim," he says, "was always to procure the extension of the classified service as rapidly as possible, and to see that the law was administered thoroughly and fairly."

It was this harmony of purpose in the Commission that made it possible for it to accomplish such a vast amount of work and place the Civil Service on such a firm basis that it can hardly be dislodged without an upheaval in the Government itself.

Mr. Roosevelt was one of the most noted advocates of the merit system, and his enmity to the spoilsmen had won him the objurgations of press and party on numberless occasions. He brought to the discharge of his new duties all the energy exhibited in his legislative career, coupled with the wiser understanding gained by three years of close application to the study of the subject. His experience as an assemblyman had taught him that he would find sturdy opposition to his plans for reform as much within his party as out of it. But he had an enthusiastic faith in the righteousness and the expediency of the Civil Service system.

His first entrance into politics was marked by fearless independence. He refused to affiliate with rings or cliques. As he had begun so he continued, and for the first time since it had become a law Civil Service became a fact.

Mr. Roosevelt not only believed in Civil Service as a theory but was determined that it should become a part of the very fiber of the Government. He had introduced the first intelligently drawn Civil Service bill ever presented in the New York legislature. By an odd coincidence this was signed by Grover Cleveland at nearly the same time in 1883 that the Civil Service reform measure drafted by Dorman B. Eaton, and championed by Senator George H. Pendleton, passed the Republican Congress at Washington, and received the signature of President Arthur. Now by another strange conjunction of circumstances the author of the New York law was put in a position where the power to enforce the national measure was largely in his hands.

To any one less sturdy and persistent than Mr. Roosevelt the task would have been appalling. Many of the Republican and Democratic politicians were opposed to the Civil Service act. Many members of Congress of both parties who

« PreviousContinue »