Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/171

Rh condition. We can only hope that the cheerful optimism betrayed by this utterance will not prevent the President from considering worthy of notice the investigations made by this League and the resulting reports upon the happenings in various branches of the service. Those reports, containing not mere theories or inferences, but facts, may serve to open his eyes to many things of which, it must be assumed, he was not aware, or which, at least, he may not have seen in their true character when he wrote his message, but a thorough appreciation of which may induce him to apply the appropriate remedies and to retrieve the grievous missteps we have now to deplore.

The picture of the retrograde tendencies in the Federal service which my duty to tell the plain truth has compelled me to draw, is relieved by some facts of a more encouraging nature. In the State of New York a distinct advance as to the maintenance as well as the further extension of the merit system has been achieved by the enactment of a new civil service law. That law not only sweeps away the contrivances by which the late State Administration sought to “take the starch out of civil service,” but it places the merit system throughout on the firm basis of well-ordered regulations, securing to it a practical machinery, and provides for the extension of its operation over the counties, in which it had formerly not been in force. Even in the City of New York, where the sinister genius of Tammany Hall devotes itself with the accustomed zest and skill to the task of circumventing the civil service law, and where the local Civil Service Reform Association coöperating with the State authorities has to fight over every foot of ground, many valuable successes have been scored—at least in crossing iniquitous schemes and in making the ways of the transgressor duly hard. Also on the other side of the