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responsibility to their constituents. But I have no doubt that if the President introduced such a system, and the Senate sought to break it down by systematically rejecting the candidates so selected, the commercial community would rise up in its might, and the public opinion of the country would teach the Senators a lesson not likely to be soon forgotten.
I said that the competitive system is the strongest bulwark so far devised against the pressure of political influence. I do not pretend, however, that it is an absolutely safe bulwark when those whom it is to protect collude with those who assail it.
It appears that the smuggling of persons into places subject to competitive examination without such an examination has been developed into a fine art in various branches of the service, and that the “beating” of the law and of the rules is extensively carried on with much ingenuity and system.
Some of these practices, as they occured in the Revenue Service, and in the Internal Departments, I have already discussed; but more is to be said. The Pension Commissioner circumvented the law in the appointment of Examining Surgeons by appointing in localities where Boards already existed, new Boards, and sending all applicants to these. As the personnel of such Boards become classified only when the amount of fees received is $300 annually, the new appointees were invariably treated as unclassified, and the old classified Boards were practically driven out of business. In the Post-Office Department it has become a not infrequent practice to appoint persons without examination as clerks in offices that are about to be made free delivery offices becoming thereby classified, and then to transfer such person, immediately after they have thus been “covered in,” to other positions in other parts of the Post-Office department, or even in other departments. Four persons have been transferred in this way to the important classified position of Post Office Inspector, four have been sent to the Treasury Department, and others to the San Francisco Mint, the Government Printing establishment, and other offices.
The method followed in the field force of the Interior Department, whereby persons have been employed temporarily in the absence of eligible lists, and all efforts to hold examin-
