to be diminished. I am not speaking of purely voluntary contributions.

If it be true that offices are trusts for the people, then it is also true that the offices should be filled by those who can perform and discharge the duties in the best possible way. Fidelity, capacity, honesty were the tests established by Mr. Jefferson when he assumed the reins of government in 1801. He said then, and said truly, that these elements in the public offices of the Government were necessary to an honest civil service, and that an honest civil service was essential to the purity and efficiency of administration, necessary to the preservation of republican institutions.

Mr. Jefferson was right. The experience of eighty years has shown it. The man best fitted should be the man placed in office, especially if the appointment is made by the servants of the people. It is as true as truth can be that fidelity, capacity, honesty are essential elements of fitness, and that the man who is most capable and most faithful and most honest is the man who is the most fit, and he should be appointed to office.

These are truths that in their statement will be denied by none, and yet the best means of ascertaining that fitness has been a vexed question with every Administration of this Government and with every man who has been charged with the responsibility of its execution. We know what is the result. Pass examinations have been tried; professions have been tried; honest endeavors have been tried; a disposition to live faithfully up to these requirements has been tried; and yet we know, and the experience of to-day shows it, that they have all made a most lamentable failure. We do not know that so great has been the increase of the powers of this Government and the number of officers under it that no President, no Cabinet, no heads of bureaus, can by possibility know the fitness of all applicants for the subordinate offices of the Government. The result has been, and under the existing system it must always be, that the President and his Cabinet and those who are charged with the responsibility have remitted the question of fitness to their own partisan friends, and those partisan friends have in their turn decided the question of fitness in favor of their partisan friends. The Administration has need of the support of members of Congress in carrying on its work. It therefore remits to members of Congress of its own party the questions of appointment to office in the various districts. These gentlemen, in the course of their political life, naturally (I do not find fault with them for it) find themselves under strain and

pressure to secure a nomination or a renomination or election, and they use the places to reward those whose friends and families and connections and aids and deputies will serve their purpose.

I put it to gentlemen, particularly to my friends on this side of the Chamber, because you have not the opportunity to exercise this patronage as much as our friends on the other side, whether or not the element of fitness enters largely into the questions of appointment in your respective districts and States? It cannot be. The necessities of the case prevent it. The pressure upon men who want to be elected prevents it. The demands that are made by partisan friends and those who have been influential and potent in securing personal triumph to gentlemen who may happen to be in such relation to the appointing power that they have the influence to secure appointment prevent it. The result is, as I have stated, that, instead of making fitness, capacity, honesty, fidelity the only or the essential qualifications for office, personal fidelity and partisan activity alone control.

When I came to the Senate I had occasion more than ever before to make some investigation upon the subject, and found, to my surprise, the extent to which the demoralization of the service had gone. I saw the civil service debauched and demoralized. I saw offices distributed to incompetent and unworthy men as a reward for the lowest of dirty partisan work. I saw many men employed to do the work of one man. I saw the money of the people shamefully wasted to keep up electioneering funds by political assessments on salaries. I saw the whole body of the public officers paid by the people organized into a compact, disciplined corps of electioneers obeying a master as if they were eating the bread of his dependence and rendering him personal service. I saw these evils were fostered, encouraged, stimulated very largely by Senators and Representatives. They had their friends who lent them a helping hand; and, regardless of the fitness of these friends, of the necessity of their employment, they insisted on the appointment and had the power which, on consideration, was found sufficient to secure it.

I believed then, and I believe now, that the existing system, which, for want of a better name, I call the "spoils system," must be killed or it will kill the Republic. I believe that it is impossible to maintain free institutions in the country upon any basis of that sort. I am no prophet of evil, I am not a pessimist in any sense of the word, but I do believe that, if the

present system goes on until 50,000,000 people shall have grown into 100,000,000, and 140,000 officers shall have grown into 300,000, with their compensation in proportion, and all shall depend upon the accession of one party or the other to the presidency and to the executive functions, the presidency of the country, if it shall last in name so long, will be put up for sale to the highest bidder, even as in ancient Rome the imperial crown was awarded to those who could raise the largest fund.

I beg gentlemen to believe that, whatever I may have said

as to the relation of parties, I do not approach the question of the form of the civil service in any mere partisan spirit. It was because I thought I saw this danger, because I believed that it was imminent, because I believed then, as I do now, that it is destructive of republicanism and will end in the downfall of republican government, that I felt it my duty to devote whatever ability I had to the consideration of this subject. It was that which induced me a year or two ago to introduce a bill which, after the best reflection, the best study, the best assistance that I coud get, I did introduce in the Senate, and which, in some degree modified, has come back from the Committe on Civil Service Reform, and is now pending before this body.

The purpose of this bill is merely to secure the application of the Jeffersonian tests-fidelity, honesty, capacity. The methods are those which are known and familiar to us all in the various avocations of life-competition, comparison.

Mr. President, it is because I believe the "spoils system" to be a great crime, because I believe it to be fraught with danger, because I believe that the highest duty of patriotism is to prevent the crime and to avoid the danger, that I advocate this or a better bill if it can be found for the improvement of the civil service.

There has been great misapprehension as to the methods and the scope of the bill. I desire the attention of the Senators while I briefly state them. The bill simply applies to the executive departments of the Government here in Washington and to those offices throughout the country-post-offices and custom houses, which employ more than fifty persons. I am told, and I am sure that I am not far out of the way, if I am not exactly accurate, that the number of such offices does not exceed thirty, or perhaps thirty-five, and that the number of persons who are employed in them, together with those in the departments here, will not exceed 10,000.

I said that this was a tentative effort; that it was intended to be an experiment, and it is because it is tentative, because it is intended to be an experiment, that the committee thought it advisable in its initial stages to limit it, as they have limited it, in the bill. The bill does not apply to elective officers, of course, nor to officers appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, nor to the military, nor to the naval, nor to the judicial establishment. It applies simply now to those officials who are employed in the departments here and in the large offices of the Government elsewhere, first, be

cause as an experiment it was thought that it gave scope enough to test its value and labor enough to employ all those who are engaged in putting it in operation until its merits shall be fairly tried and it shall commend itself either to the approval or condemnation of the American people.

There was another reason. The heads of offices and bureaus where the number of employees is small can themselves personally judge of the fitness of persons who are applicants for appointment, knowing, as they do, more or less in their narrow communities their antecedents, their habits, and their modes of life.

The bill does not touch the question of tenure of office or of removal from office. It leaves those questions exactly where the law now finds them. It concerns itself only with admission to the public service; it concerns itself only with discovering in certain proper ways or in certain ways-gentlemen may differ as to whether they are proper or not-the fitness of the persons who shall be appointed. It takes cognizance of the fact that it is impossible for the head of a department or a large office personally to know all the applicants, and therefore it provides a method by which, when a vacancy occurs by death, by resignation, by the unlimited power of removal, a suitable person may be designated to fill a vacancy. It says in effect that when a vacancy occurs in the civil service everybody who desires entrance shall have the right to apply. Everybody, humble, poor, without patronage, without influence, whatever may be his condition in life, shall have the right to go before the parties charged with an examination of his fitness and there be subjected to the test of open, regulated, fair, impartial examination.

The preamble expresses fully the philosophy of the bill. Read it carefully. It sets forth what common justice demands for the citizen and for the Government. It sets forth what the economy, efficiency, and integrity of the public service demand.

Whereas common justice requires that, so far as practicable, all citizens duly qualified shall be allowed equal opportunities, on grounds of personal fitness, for securing appointments, employment, and promotion in the subordinate civil service of the United States; and

Whereas justice to the public likewise requires that the Government shall have the largest choice among those likely to answer the requirements of the public service: and

Whereas justice, as well as economy, efficiency, and integrity in the public service, will be promoted by substituting open and uniform competitive examinations for the examinations heretofore held in pursuance of the statutes of 1853 and 1855.