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would be welcomed by the advocates of civil service reform with hearty gratitude.
It is not surprising that the frequent recurrence of the announcement coming from Washington, that the President was resolved to except certain classes of officers from the operation of the civil service law, should have had a somewhat unsettling effect upon those branches of the service which were reported to be most concerned. It being, for instance, taken for certain that the Deputy Internal Revenue collectors would be excluded from the classified service, many Internal Revenue collectors proceeded to remove their deputies and appointed others without the slightest regard for the civil service rules, defending their lawless conduct by the pretense that they were only anticipating an Executive order, which they believed was sure to come.
The Treasury Department, indeed, in one or two cases, addressed to the officers concerned a mild remonstrance against so flagrant a breach of discipline, apt to demoralize the whole service by contagious example, but when the remonstrance proved unavailing, no further steps to punish the offenders or to prevent repetition of the same offence were taken.
The Department of Justice did the same thing, in a considerable number of cases, and utterly ignored the remonstrances made by the Civil Service Commission.
Now, I would respectfully ask whether the circumstance that an order of exception was merely foreshadowed in newspaper reports, should be regarded as a valid excuse for violating the rules in anticipation of it, and whether these Departments should have permitted such violations to pass with impunity?
In the Interior Department likewise many appointments, especially in the inspecting and examining forces of the General Land Office, were made with entire disregard of the principles of the civil service law and the rules under it.
The plea in justification was in many cases that there were no eligible lists available at the time when the appointments were made, but the flimsiness of that excuse appeared from the fact that when examinations might have been held, and eligible lists might have been formed, that means of keeping the offices in question practically within the classified service
