Page:The Present State of Civil Service Reform p91.jpg

 rumored that a large number has been applied for but not granted.

There is then at once the striking fact so characteristic of the spoils system that as soon as the possibility of obtaining office by a suspension of the civil service rules becomes known, the applicants gather and multiply and one of the advantages gained by the introduction of the merit system, namely to relieve the Executive of troublesome pressure, is thereby in the same measure lost. Another consequence of greater moment is sure to follow. As the pressure for such suspensions of the rules increases, the number will also increase, and with their growing frequency the scrutiny of the reasons held to justify such suspensions will inevitably relax. This is no mere conjecture on my part. We have already had the actual experience of it. In studying the record you will be struck by the fact that, the suspending practice once under way, its operation was not at all confined to places requiring peculiar qualifications, but that it descended to ordinary clerkships and even to messenger places, and that in some instances the reason given for exceptional action appears exceedingly slight.

Nor will the practice, if continued, remain confined, as it so far in the main has been, to places in the government departments in Washington. The contagion will inevitably spread to the government offices throughout the country, and the President will be crowded with requests for suspensions of the rules from Collectors of Customs and Collectors of the Internal Revenue, and Postmasters and other heads of government establishments, whenever they want for one reason or another to place some particular person in some particular berth and find the civil service rules in their way. And the larger the number of such applications grows, the less will the President be able to give each case his personal attention, the more will he have to depend upon the advice given him by his subordinates high and low—some of whom may not be nearly as conscientious in such things as he is himself—and the more certainly will the new practice slide into the old ruts of the spoils system with