through competitive examinations, and included men of every party and from every section of the country.

Says Mr. Roosevelt: "From the beginning of the present system each President of the United States has been its friend (the Commission's) but no President has been a radical Civil Service reformer. Presidents Arthur, Harrison and Cleveland have all desired to see the Service extended, and to see the law well administered. No one of them has felt willing or able to do all that the reformers asked or to pay much heed to their wishes, save as regards that portion of the Service to which the law actually applied. Each has been a sincere party man who has felt strongly on such questions as those of the tariff, of finance, and of our foreign policy, and each has been obliged to conform more or less closely to the wishes of his party associates and fellow party leaders; and, of course, these party leaders and the party politicians generally wished the offices to be distributed as they had been ever since Andrew Jackson became President. In consequence, the offices outside the protection of the law have still been treated under every administration as patronage, to be disposed of in e interest of the dominant party. An occasional exception has been made here and there, but with altogether insignificant exceptions the great bulk of the non-classified places have been changed for political reasons by each administration, the officeholders politically opposed to the administration being supplanted or succeeded by political adherents of the administration."

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The Cabinet officers, though often not Civil Service reformers originally, usually become such before their terms of office expire. This was true without exception of all the Cabinet officers with whom Mr. Roosevelt was brought into personal contact while he was on the Commission. Moreover, from their high position and their appreciation of the responsibility of their offices, Cabinet officers are certain to refrain from a personal violation of the law, while they will

try to secure a formal compliance with its demands on the part of their subordinates.

"In most cases it is necessary, however, to goad them continually to see that they do not allow their subordinates to evade the law," to quote Mr. Roosevelt in his article on "Civil Service Reform," "and it is very difficult to get either the President or the head of a Department to punish these subordinates when they have evaded it."

There was not much open violation of the law during his in- cumbency, because such violation could be reached through the courts; but in the small offices and bureaus an unscrupulous chief of an office or bureau may persecute his subordinates who are politically opposed to him, if he have the chance, and force them to resign; or to trump up charges against them which will cause them to be dismissed.

"If this is done in a sufficient number of cases men of the opposite political party think that it is useless to enter the examinations; and by staying out they leave the way clear for the offender to get precisely the men he wishes for the eligible registers."

Against this chicanery Mr. Roosevelt was very severe. But the cases were isolated. In some of the Departments this form of evasion was never tolerated, and where the Commission had the force under its eye the chances of injustice were few. Congress had control of the appropriations for the Commission, and as it could not do its work with ample funds the action of Congress was vital to its welfare.

"Many even of the friends of the system in the country at large are astonishingly ignorant of who the men are who have battled most effectively for the law and for good government in either the Senate or the Lower House. It is not only necessary that a man shall be good and possess the desire to do decent things, but it is also necessary that he shall be courageous, practical and efficient if his work is

to amount to anything. There is a good deal of rough-and-tumble fighting in Congress, as there is in all our political life, and a man is entirely out of place in it if he does not possess the virile qualities, and if he fails to show himself ready and able to hit back when assailed. Moreover, he must be alert, vigorous and intelligent if he is going to make his work count. The friends of the Civil Service, like the friends of all other laws, would be in a bad way if they had to rely solely upon the backing of the timid good."

Mr. Roosevelt has never been averse to taking his part in a vigorous argument, and he was often called upon to have a share in these arguments while he was on the Commission. His article on the Civil Service is so full of comprehension of the subject that one is tempted to quote it lengthily in order to convey an understanding of his attitude when he was so often assailed by the money-getting politicians who opposed his ideas of reform.

"There is need of further legislation," he explains, "to perfect and extend the law and the system; but Congress has never been willing seriously to consider a proposition looking to this extension. On the other hand, efforts to repeal the law or to destroy it by new legislation have uniformly been failures and have rarely gone beyond a committee. Occasionally, in an appropriation bill or some other measure, an amendment will be slipped through adding forty of fifty employees to the classified service, or providing that the law shall not apply to them; but nothing important has ever been done in this way."

In the final session of the Fifty-third Congress an incident occurred which deserves to be related in full, as it affords an example of the many cases which arise to test the efficiency of the friends of reform in Congress. According to the original law of 1883, the Secretary of the Commission was allowed a salary of sixteen hundred dollars a year. As the Commission's work and force grew the