Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/160

136 also Mr. Conrad, a former Solicitor-General of the United States, and Mr. Charles J. Bonaparte, a lawyer of high standing in Maryland, and Mr. Moorfield Storey, a former President of the American Bar Association, whose opinions the Administration might have read in the report of the Civil Service Commission for 1896-7. The Commission itself submitted a strong argument sustaining the legality of the classification.

Now I ask in all candor, what will the merit system in the public service come to if, when a solicitor of some Department says that in his view the classification of a certain numerous force of the service is illegal, that declaration is at once accepted as “the highest legal opinion the Department can get,” and the President thereupon actually exempts that branch of the service from the rules?

If we take as valid such reasons for curtailing the classified service, how long shall we be able to resist the spoils politicians showing us that there are other and far more numerous classes of places, the appointment to which is by statute vested in certain officers, and which, therefore, must be excluded from the merit system? They may even point out to us a statute providing that “each head of a Department is authorized to employ in his Department such number of clerks of the several classes recognized by law, and such other employees, and at such rates of compensation respectively as may be appropriated for by Congress from year to year,” and they may thereupon argue that, the law thus vesting the appointment of clerks and other employees in the heads of Departments, no interference by civil service rules with the discretionary power of the heads of Departments in making such appointments can be legal. And I should not at all wonder if one or more Department solicitors could be found to deliver as their opinion that,