upon to sympathize with a cabinet officer who, sending for his stenographer, finds that she has taken the day off. We are asked to picture that cabinet officer sitting resignedly all day without a stenographer and unable to dismiss her because she is under civil service rules. We need not waste our sympathies on him. All he has to do is to send word to that stenographer that she has been dismissed for being absent without leave. The dismissed employee is allowed three days to prove that her absence was unavoidable, but she must lay her evidence before the chief who dismissed her. He it is who decides, and she dare not appeal over his head to someone higher in authority. The chief may, if favorably disposed toward an offending employee, suspend him for ninety days, pending an investigation, but such suspensions are most unusual. Prompt dismissal is the rule and, if any superintendent of any office retains an unsatisfactory employee, it is because he has his own reasons for doing so.

Sometimes, it is said, the candidate at the head of the eligible list, the one who has answered all the questions and shown the requisite technical skill, is a failure in the practical work of an office. How are you going to get rid of him? By the very same rule which we have been considering. He may remain three months on probation in the hope that he may improve, or he may be dismissed as soon as he shows himself a failure.

The fourth of the main objections to the merit system in government and which is offered with the triumphant air of one who feels that his argument is unanswerable, is that it is undemocratic, because it makes a privileged and permanent class of officeholders and under a democracy everyone must be given a chance. According to the high authority of Theodore Roosevelt, the merit system is as democratic as the common school system itself, for under it every citizen is free to apply for a position under the government and, after a free and open competition, the position goes to the one who by practical tests has proved himself the most capable.

Under the spoils system, on the contrary, no person need think of applying for any position unless he has good political backing and the place goes to the man who has the strongest pull. Which of the two systems appeals to your reason as

the more democratic? As to the objection against permanent officeholding, the chief difficulty is that the men and women in the classified service have not the permanency that the law is meant to give. At every change of administration many are forced out by partisan influence, and the one very unfortunate consequence of this lack of permanency is that the best men, the kind that should serve the state, do not apply for positions and only too often decline them when offered.

This is an age of fierce competition, and no well-equipped young man can afford to take a position that may last only four years. He must get something permanent for his own sake and for the sake of his family. And when we are considering permanency, no employee appointed under civil service rules dare hope to be as permanent as the professional officeholder. Under one administration he may hold one kind of an office; under another, one in a totally different department; and under a third, he will do still another kind of work. He cannot be proficient in them all, but dependable party workers must always have official recognition and it is they who form the privileged permanent class. It is one of the fundamental doctrines of the spoils system that any person is fit for any job so long as it is a government job. A saloonkeeper may be made a director of public safety. I knew one such in anti-prohibition days. A bootblack may become a magistrate, a man who sells papers at a news-stand may be a member of the Board of Health. You may be inclined to question this last statement, but I have the facts.

But even admitting for the sake of argument that any man is fitted to do anything under the government, he may still have to learn the ways of doing it and much time and money are wasted while new officials are trying to get some idea about their business. A special agent of the Treasury Department says in a recent report: "A new man unfamiliar with the work of a revenue collector can hardly succeed in collecting 20 per cent of the amount due the government." And where the spoils system prevails, as it does in thirtyeight states, there will be probably a new man in every office at every change of administration. Would any sane business man make a practice of turning off all his clerks every four years and replacing them with new and untried men? Did

anyone propose to dismiss General Pershing and the officers under him after four years' service, or Admiral Sims and the valiant commanders and marines who led our navy to victory?

To be perfectly logical, if it is wise and democratic to insist upon rotation in office in the civil service which affects every citizen every hour of every day for good or for ill, it must be equally wise and democratic in every branch of the government and in every relation of life. Let us therefore dismiss our colonels and captains, our commanders and marines, our ministers and doctors, our grocers and cooks, every four years and give the other fellow a chance.

Well, say the objectors with their backs against the wall, if the merit system is as democratic and effective as you maintain, why do we have so often inefficient officials in the classified service? The answer is easy. No civil service law, however good, is better than the commission that administers it. I once asked a newly appointed president of the Civil Service Commission of Philadelphia if he would speak to the Civic Club on the law and its effects on the city government. He replied, "I don't know a darned thing about it." I knew he didn't when I asked him, so I asked again, "When you shall have learned something about it will you come and speak to us?" He said he would, but as he never came, I inferred that he had never learned anything, and his decisions as president of the commission confirmed my inference. I have had the humiliation as a citizen to hear two presidents of the United States Civil Service Commission apologize for their lack of knowledge of the civil service law. They had been appointed for political reasons. The United States Civil Service Commission is a judicial body and ranks officially next to the Supreme Court. Why not also appoint its three members for life? The English National Civil Service Commission is appointed for life in order to preserve the dignity of the office and keep it above political control, and with a life tenure for our commission a president would hesitate to appoint, as he so often does, mere politicians who can be dismissed by his successor.

And if the law is no better than the commission which administers it, the commission is no better than the executive who appoints it. A partisan president, governor, or mayor will appoint a partisan commission and the law will become

a farce. At present in one of our large cities the manager of a small "movie" theater has been made a member of the civil service commission. He may be a successful producer of moving pictures but that would not appear to qualify him as an interpreter and administrator of the civil service law. As the law is no better than the commission that puts it into effect, and the commission is no better than the executive to which it owes its existence, so no executive, no president, governor, or mayor is better than the people who elect him. In a democracy everything comes back to the people. No government is better than the people make it, nor worse than they allow it to become.

We Americans have shown that we want an efficient army and navy. We maintain fine schools at West Point and Annapolis to train men in the science of war, but for the civil service upon which the army and navy depend we ask only political qualifications. Thirty-eight states and several branches of the federal government demand of their civil employees no training, no special knowledge of their duties. The one serious question to be answered is: Have you always voted a straight ticket?

A teacher who has been initiating the children of the wildest sections of the Cumberland Mountains into the mysteries of the three R's told me that to her amazement a woman of her district came to her one day and said she wanted to see the flag. "My husband fit for the Union," she said, "but I hain't never seen the flag." The teacher wrote at once to her friends in the North for a large handsome flag, which she took with her from one cove to another as she went her educational rounds.

One day a woman from a cove still unvisited went to the teacher's home and asked, "You-all are coming over to our cove on Saturday and going to bring the flag?" "Yes," assented the teacher. "Well," said the woman, "I must tell you I ain't got but two cheers." The teacher who understood the vernacular, replied, "We shall not need any chairs. It is warm and we can sit on the grass.' "Ah," said the woman, "but the song says three cheers for the red, white, and blue, and I ain't got but two." She evidently had in her mind a picture of the flag draped over three chairs lest it should touch the ground.

The glory of our flag is made and sustained by the three branches of our government-the military, the naval, and the civil. It rests securely upon the substantial supports we have made for the first two, but for the civil service we have provided only a three-legged stool. And as we are always lengthening one leg or shortening another, the stool wobbles and the symbol of our country's glory trails upon the ground. Why not three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue?

POLITICAL ASSESSMENTS AND PARTISAN ACTIVITY OF FEDERAL OFFICIALS AND EMPLOYEES

Extracts from pamphlet on "Information Concerning Political Assessments and Partisan Activity of Federal Officeholders and Employees," published by the United States Civil Service Commission in 1926.

I. Political Activity of Competitive Employees.

1. Civil Service Rule I, Section 1, is as follows: "No person in the executive civil service shall use his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with an election or affecting the results thereof. Persons who by the provisions of these rules are in the competitive classified service, while retaining the right to vote as they please and to express privately their opinions on all political subjects, shall take no active part in political management or in political campaigns."

II. Political Activity of Presidential Officers and Incumbents of Unclassified and Excepted Positions.

35. Executive order of July 14, 1886:

"I deem this a proper time especially to warn all subordinates in the several departments and all officeholders under the general government against the use of their official positions in attempts to control political movements in their localities.

"Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their