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recommendations for appointments to consular offices, on such and similar grounds, innumerable times. And there can be no doubt that many appointments to consulships have been made for reasons no better than those I have mentioned.
That under such circumstances many unfit persons have found their way into the consular service, is not astonishing. Far more astonishing is it, that under such a system of selection the consular service has not become far more inefficient than we find it. For it must be admitted that while many lamentable failures are to be deplored, some of our consular officers have successfully mastered their duties and rendered the country excellent service. But it must be kept in mind that this has been the result of happy accident—accident that may well happen with a people of great mental alertness and adaptability—than of a rational and systematic method of selection; that it happened not because of, but in spite of, the absence of such a method; and that so long as consular offices are filled not on the ground of well ascertained merit and fitness, but as a matter of political or personal favoritism—of patronage—we shall never be able to count upon making our consular service what it ought to be.
Now, as to the remedy. The report justly says, that the best way to ascertain a man's qualification is to “examine him.” But it also, quite truthfully, sets forth that every attempt to do this, and to exclude the element of favoritism, of patronage, from the appointment of consuls by mere pass examinations has resulted in utter failure. Every such attempt, from the time of Seward to the time of Olney, was no doubt made in perfect good faith and with the best of intentions. But in every instance, the pass-examination designed to test the qualifications of candidates proposed by “influence,” gradually degenerated into a mere matter of form, and, as a rule, the candidate who hat the strongest influence behind him, got the place. And when that point was reached, the ghastly masquerade of the pass-examination was either altogether abandoned, or it was for a time continued, to be despised and made fun of. Nothing can be more self evident to any man of experience than that, as the Civil Service Commission expresses it, “It is to the competitive system, which has so greatly improved the other parts of the service, that we must look for the permanent betterment of the consular branch.”
