CIVIL SERVICE AND DEPARTMENTAL DISCIPLINE Address of Hon. Wm. Drennan, Civil Service Commissioner of the City of New York. The objective of the civil service reformer has been achieved. In principle the merit system has been established, firmly established, I hold, in America. Its extension will be opposed but only where democracy is decaying and where bigotry, illiteracy and their concomitants are flourishing. Show me a commonwealth that offers no sanctuary to the merit system, and I will show you a ruling class dastard to the challenge of true democracy. From such a class opposition to the merit system must be expected, not because it is the merit system, but because it is simply an improvement. The legitimate basic arguments in honorable opposition to the merit system, when it seemed but a plausible speculation have been proved by experience to have been false. The arguments now advanced when it is a demonstrated thesis seem wanting in good faith and therefore make little appeal for charitable characterization. On the other hand the establishment of the merit system in principle would seem to have rendered archaic the expression "Civil Service Reformer." If the word "Reform" has any odium attached to it, it is not due to the splendid men who gave the merit system to a spoils-weary country or to the earnest people who have since so ably defended it. Critics are industrious in spreading the thought that your Civil Service Reformer is but a civil service informer, a tattler,-a babbler, a gossip, the unworthy and petty residuary legatee of big men who did big things in days gone by. These critics will not - recognize in a league of civil service reform, a league for the defense of the merit system. And yet I hazard the guess that civil service reformers of today have achieved more genuine success in developing and defending the merit system where introduced than in attempting to introduce it to communities unused and uneducated to it, ignorant and unworthy of it. For truly, it is a waste of time to plead the merit system to ears that are deaf to the word "Justice"; and commonwealths dominated by those who would deny constitutional rights to certain races and creeds and political groups, will scarcely allow their victims to obtain honors through any scheme of honorable competition., It may sound paradoxical, but you will get further by staying at home. The success of what you have undertaken will be the best incentive for its introduction elsewhere, if introduction be at all possible; for the lightning of such success will travel faster and farther than the thunder of your theories. Better defend the forts you have won than waste your energies winning forts that are not worth defending. But is the merit system such a success that that success alone would carry conviction to open minded men? Can we divest ourselves of our partisanship to entertain a candid criticism? He who knows his weakness knows his strength and if there be a weakness in the merit system and we recognize it, are we not already on the road to remedying it? Under the protection of the merit system or some system suggestive of it some three-quarters of a million employes, we are told, hold tenure in America today. We cannot say that this is an inadequate number upon which to predicate a correct conclusion, nor can we say that the system has not had a fair chance in length of time to fully justify itself. Are these 700,000 odd employes pre-eminently superior to those who held sway under the spoils system or do they but indicate an improvement which should be credited more justly to the tendencies of the time than to the influence of the merit system? To what extent do private employes seek to allure competitive employes from public service? Does the applicant for private employment find his experience as a public employe a handicap? With all the safeguards we have surrounded, or attempted to surround, his tenure, does his work for the public (which after all is the final test) quite measure up to the splendid promise of that system of which he is at once a product and exhibit? These questions and the thoughts that they suggest are to me at least quite disturbing and not everyone who cavalierly sweeps them aside is necessarily a better friend of the merit system. Suggestive of impartiality at least is the natural attitude of the private employer to the merit system. I believe that the average private employer still looks askance at an applicant who has been a public employe, still considers him as in the olden days over-paid, incompetent and undisciplined. A readiness to drain the public service of its personnel was never displayed by the private employer except during war times when he could get "nobody else." Is this attitude after all really one of prejudice or is it in truth shrewd judgment? Ask him has he any objection to hiring a former public employe, he will probably say "no"; ask him if he ever gave a position to a former public employe when he could get someone else, he will probably say "certainly", and the interesting thing about this will be that he will not be telling the truth in either case. A few examples may indeed be given of private enterprises having won over unusually clever people from the public service, but my hearers are too sensible to be deceived by the probative value of a few isolated cases. If the "turn-over" of public employes is remarkably small, it is simply because private employers won't let them turn over. Until the competitive public employe becomes potentially the successful competitor of the private employe for private employment, the competitive public employe fails to square with the system that champions him. That he does not reflect compensating credit on the merit system is a fact, but it is a defect of the system, not a fault of the employe. Giving an opera hat to a savage does not make him an impresario, and by the same token, giving the competitive system to the job holder,-still leaves him,quite primitive. If you would lift civil service from the status of a job to the dignity of a profession, add discipline. Give the competitive employes of America a discipline as scientific, as fair, and as reliable as the examination system, and you yourself will be thrilled to hear his boast, "I am a civil service employe." Now, when I speak of "discipline" I use it in its largest sense; not the discipline that irritates, humiliates and harasses, destroys morale and sets every employe in petty antagonism to his fellow, but that discipline that strengthens and develops, that brings out the best that is in an employe, that we know is in him, and that he is only too ready to display. That discipline must be Uniform It must be uniform even as the examination system is uniform. The discipline that is pronounced in one department and absent in another, works no good to the merit system. A discipline that is strong under one head of a department and weak under his successor is demoralizing. Can you imagine what conditions would obtain if every department were allowed to conduct its own examination system and every change in the head of the department would mean some change in that system? The arguments in favor of such a proceeding are almost identical with the arguments justifying the present day discipline of employes. With departmental heads, discipline is an incident calling for the most casual and indifferent treatment, but its effect upon the public servant and the public service is too profound to justify such indifference. The merit system is not called upon to justify itself for the material it has supplied to departments, but departments are called upon to justify themselves for what they have done to that material. Such discipline must be constant. A proper discipline fairly enforced under one administration, abandoned under another, to be resurrected under a third, is equally demoralizing, for it is bound to destroy the essential purpose of correct discipline-obtaining service as a fixed habit of a human being and not as the reaction of a trained flea, or as one of our former friends of the English literary world would express it |