Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/145



. — The meeting of the American Bar Association at Saratoga on August Igth-22d promises to be of extraordinary interest. The Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Russell, is coming over to deliver the annual address. He will probably be accompanied by three or four prominent members of the English Bar.

. — That the State employs officials in order that they may serve it, and through it the people, needs scarcely to be said. The proposition, on the contrary, that it is any part of the real purpose of public office to provide officials with salaries, is condemned by its very statement. It is fortunate that the action of the Massachusetts Legislature in taking the last step, the step which made it clear be yond reasonable doubt that, in ordering the preference of veteran soldiers of the late war, it was not concerned with their fitness for office, and the step which could only be justified by regarding good government and competent service as immaterial has met from a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of the State with the rebuke that it deserved. Brown v. C. T. Russell, Jr. et al., Civil Service Commissioners (not yet reported).

The law (chapter 501 of 1895) made mandatory the appointment of any veteran, however unfit, who applied for any office and filed with h application the recommendation of any three citizens "of good repute."

The particular application of this which came before the court was to an office requiring peculiar capacities, that of state detective, and the very ludicrousness of the idea that any veteran of the late war whom any three citizens "of good repute " would certify to be fit must needs be appointed a detective without regard to his fitness may have helped to secure the unanimity of the decision. Clearly one must stop somewhere. The Attorney General (who argued for the constitutionality of the law) is protected by the Constitution. But the public service would get into a sorry state if any veteran could insist on being appointed Assistant.