For these reasons it seems to me highly desirable that some step of the kind indicated in the report of the committee should be taken, and I am quite clear in my own mind that it will be found, after a year or so of trial, that this rule will prove entirely satisfactory, except that even under this rule there will be too few rather than too many removals.

I might say parenthetically that I think the importance of this new rule has been very much exaggerated. I have not heard of any particular increase in the number of removals. I think the principal good effect is going to be in toning up the service, and I think that is the only point on which I can differ with the report of the committee, and except for that I heartily endorse the report.

I am particularly interested in noticing the vote of the Council which proposes to confer additional power upon postmasters, collectors and other local officers, because I regard that as rather an important thing.

MR. WESTERN STARR-The substantial essence of what I wish to say with reference to the enlargement of the power of removal is that the effect to be seen already in many jurisdictions where civil service is in force, as a result of the order of the President of October, has been pernicious in the extreme. I am not speaking of the Federal civil service, but of municipal civil service. I happen to have had an experience of something over ten years in looking after the interests of municipal civil service employees, and I venture to predict that there is a view of civil service application which has never been presented to this body, and that is not the view of the general public in whose behalf the service exists, or the view of the administrator who is responsible for his administration, but the point of view of the municipal or civil service employee.

The power of removal, where it exists, is a power hostile to the spirit of civil service reform, and I can demonstrate that by one short statement which I think will be admitted as a fact. Wherever it has been attempted to

establish civil service as an institution by municipal or State regulation the men who have been opposed to civil service reform, from whatever motive, when finally driven to their last retreat, fall back on the absolute power of discharge without the necessity of filing charges. With that clause in the law they feel absolutely secure that the law itself will not be a serious menace to the interests which they have in their control. It is that point that I wish to bring out.

In Illinois we have very recently secured the establishment of a civil service law for the benefit of our State. This law was urgently appealed for during many years. past, but it has been impossible to secure the establishment of a law which should require the filing of charges against employees to secure dismissal. The men who claim the responsibility for all the good that there is in our law, and who were effective in securing it, disclaim and repudiate responsibility for those features of the law which leave the system practically as it was under the spoils system, because with our present State law there is absolutely no difference between the old system and the new system, except the establishment of a filter through which appointees may pass, and even that is only partial in the application.

There is an enormous fund of information which comes to one interested in the spirit of civil service reform in a practical observation of ten years, looking at it from the side of the employee. The stalwart militarism to which General Winckler gave expression yesterday in support of the proposition that the absolute power of removal should exist, is merely the return to autocracy, a return to the one man power. It was very well illustrated by Lieutenant-Colonel Pettit in his address to the Military Institute on Staten Island, when he said that no effective military machine can exist except under an emperor or an autocrat. That is the spirit of the men who desire to use the civil service as their instrument.

This question as to whether this power of absolute removal should exist, or whether charges should be filed or not, is merely the result of the clash of conflicting interests, and will finally be settled on the basis of what is

best. But the people have long recognized the fact that patronage has ceased to be the instrument of partizanship, that it has become the instrument simply of business interests; and the people have gone behind the civil service and gone into the proposition to destroy the evil of the spoils system at its very root. They propose to take away completely the opportunities for the use of patronage as a tool of business interests, or as the instrument of partisanship.

Now, permit me to give you an illustration of the result of some of the abuses that exist in the city of Chicago, as applied to municipal employees, under a law which requires that charges shall be filed before removal and that the employee shall have opportunity to be heard in his own behalf. That, of course, does not exist under the Federal law, and I doubt if it exists in any general sense under any other municipal law in the country, but yet under our law we have not quite the right idea even now. The records of the Civil Service Commission of Chicago show, and I in my own experience am prepared to testify to the fact, that under this necessity of filing charges the very best and most capable and efficient servants that the city of Chicago has ever had, in technical or special qualifications or in general capacities, such as ward foremen, engineers, superintendents of bureaus and others of quite a high grade of capacity, have been removed time and again under the administration of a socalled and supposedly civil service commission, while men who were absolutely at the time under indictment, not only for violation of the statutes of the State, but for violations of the civil service law itself, could not be removed, and charges filed against them would not be heard of. I can give you an instance in point. More than three years ago charges were filed against the head of an important bureau in Chicago, backed up by affidavits and supported by many pages of typewritten specifications. These were placed in a pigeonhole and stayed there, and remained there even after repeated demands. for reasons why they were not heard, and until a new administration came in, and until possibly political, personal and official reasons finally led to the exhumation of

these charges from the pigeonhole. Now they are being brought down to date and the man will be brought up for trial. The point is this: Absolute power in the hands of any man has a tremendously bad effect on the man that possesses it. There never was a human being yet who had absolute power to whom it was not a curse, and who did not degenerate under its use and exercise. Where the interests at stake are so vast, it is not to be supposed that men will be free from the general principle. I believe the power of removal, as expressed by the order of the President, is a bad precedent and that it will be abused and that it is hostile to true civil service reform.

MR. ANSLEY WILCOX-The subject which you have before you is so broad a one that I think the only possible action that could properly be taken was taken by the Council in referring it back to the committee, without committing the League any further by any enunciation. of principles on the subject.

We listened with great interest last night to General Winckler's discussion of the abstract principles, and to many of us it carried conviction, if we had not conviction on the subject before. We have just listened to a very able and interesting presentation of the other view of the matter, and whether it carries conviction or not, it arrests one's attention and makes one pause before attempting to decide so broad a question.

And I just want to call attention here officially to the wide divergence of practice upon this subject, and the very different practical views which we hold about it. In the Federal service there was at first substantially no restriction upon removal, and none was proposed. As you know, it is a matter of history in this League that Mr. Eaton and Mr. Curtis, who were our leaders in the early stages of this movement, announced repeatedly and emphatically the doctrine which General Winckler spoke for last night, that it was sufficient to guard the entrance to the service, and that if the entrance to the service was thoroughly safeguarded and it was made im

possible for the appointing power to appoint the man of his personal choice, or one dictated to him by a political boss, all motive for improper appointments was removed. Then in the interests of discipline they said the appointing officer should be left free-handed to control his own working force and remove whom he pleased in the interests of the service, because he would have no temptation to make an improper appointment, having no power to make one. That was their argument, and it seemed a very forcible one. There came into the Federal service during President Cleveland's administration a man whose name is very deserving of prominent mention, and that is my friend E. S. Bissell, a graduate of Yale, and a practical lawyer in Buffalo, who became Postmaster General. He was no ardent advocate of civil service reform, he attended few of our meetings and confined his interests practically to paying his annual dues. But he, as the Postmaster General of the United States, told me that he could not eradicate the spoils system from the civil service without guarding it at both ends. That no matter how we safeguarded it by examination, we would have to guard against the temptation of removal; that when once thoroughly established, however, we would not have to safeguard removals any more, and that only when we can get people out of the habit of considering the post offices as spoils, and thoroughly into the habit of regarding them as rewards of merit determined by fair competition, will discipline be satisfied if we leave the exits clear. Those were Postmaster General Bissell's views. He first introduced this plan, and from that has grown this order of general application in the Federal service.

In the State of New York we have nothing of the kind. We had it once in one of our laws which was repealed; but under the present civil service law of New York there is no suggestion of any restriction upon the power of removal, and we think we have nearly an ideal law for our State service. But I come from Buffalo, and not from New York City.

In addition to our civil service law we have a veterans' preference law, which gives veterans of the civil