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chine in order—that the ambition of this person should be gratified, and they assail the President with suitable urgency, telling him that the people of their respective States or districts demand just this thing, and that unless it be done the consequences to the party will be awful.
The President is impressed. It may happen that the candidate presented to him is a very improper person, and that the respectable part of the community from which he comes make, with more or less indignation, their protest against the appointment, as happened in the case of the notorious Saylor, of Pennsylvania, whose appointment to a consulship even standing above the $2,500 level was successfully demanded by Senator Quay. Now the President considers that he needs the support of this Senator or Representative for whatever policy he may wish to put through Congress, and, if the candidate aspires to a consulship subject to an examination, he orders him to be examined. The candidate then passes the examination, as a matter of course, and the appointment follows. It is the old story.
Now, I do not deny that in this way some meritorious persons have been appointed—be it that their congressional patrons were uncommonly conscientious, or that they happened to find that they could by presenting such a person do themselves a good turn. But in view of the fact that in the same manner many inefficient and generally improper persons have found their way into the Consular service, and that this method of appointment encourages, with every change of administration, sweeping removals of Consular officers, when after some years of service they have acquired a certain desirable degree of experience and efficiency, it will be admitted that this is certainly not a system calculated to give the American business community as good a Consular representation abroad as it should have. It is our duty to call things by their right names, and that duty compels me to acknowledge the fact that, Secretary Olney's step in the right direction notwithstanding, the method of selecting and appointing Consular officers is substantially what it was under the frank and open old spoils system. The business men and the commercial bodies that have petitioned and memorialized for the reform of the Consular Service with so much energy, and who were made to believe that by the Olney order at least a beginning of that
