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 without examination if they deem such appointments proper. This act the Supreme Court has held to be constitutional.

In Pennsylvania, too, the adoption of a civil service law is in prospect. A committee of the Civil Service Reform Association has drafted a bill, and that bill has been substantially endorsed by the Republican State Committee as well as the State Convention of the same party. Let us hope that it will pass unscathed the snares and pitfalls of legislative action and place this old commonwealth in the front rank of reform States. Civil service bills are also likely to be introduced this winter in the legislatures of Minnesota, where a bill presented by Senator Ozmun passed at least one House at the last session, and in Colorado where the civil service reform cause has the advantage of strong and active sympathy among the women voters.

Nothing could be more encouraging than the fact that in several States the people of individual cities, without waiting for general acts of legislation, have secured civil service reform by means of amendments to their charters. In Louisiana the city of New Orleans has obtained a charter embodying provisions for the application of strict civil service rules to every municipal department. In Seattle and Tacoma, the principal cities of the State of Washington, in the extreme Northwest of the country, similar rules have been placed in the charter by popular vote. Evanston in Illinois has also adopted the merit system by a vote of the people under the provision of the Illinois State act, thus following the example of Chicago. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, California, in Wheeling, West Virginia, in Galveston, Texas, in Denver, Colorado, and in St. Louis, Missouri, steps have been taken toward the same end.

Thus North and South and East and West, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the Northern frontier, the seed of the reform sentiment which so long seemed to have been sown in vain, is vigorously pushing and promising a harvest which not a few years ago was beyond the most sanguine flights of expectation.

But let us not indulge in the delusion that what has been gained can be preserved intact and that more can be won without a continuation of incessant watchfulness and militant effort. The tactics of the spoils-politicians have indeed changed from the direct to the indirect attack. The theoretical argument