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were speeches made, some of which resembled in their fierceness of denunciation the wild fury of Indian war whoops. But the investigation served only to show that the working of the merit system had been most beneficial wherever the civil service regulations had been most faithfully enforced; and the boisterous oratory served only to expose the futility of the intent to hide the absence of argument by vituperate epithets and frantic exclamations. The result was the utter failure of the legislation hostile to the merit system, which had been intended, and that result was unquestionably due to the restraining power of that public opinion which sternly condemns any backward step from the position gained by the advance of civil service reform. It must be emphasized that the President himself also earnestly discountenanced legislation of that kind, and assiduously used his influence to discourage and prevent it.
We have indeed to admit that under cover of the pressure put upon the Government by the breaking out of the Spanish War, some things were done during that session which looked like real successes of spoils politics. The War Department, as well as the Navy Department demanded, to satisfy the exigencies of the time, many additions to various classes of the service under them. The additions were certainly needed, and needed without much delay. The question was only whether the persons needed could be taken from existing eligible lists, or through examinations that might have been speedily held. This question was raised when the Emergency Bill, appropriating money for such positions, was up in Congress. The chairman of the Committee on Appropriations in the House, who had charge of the bill, asked that the additional force be appointed without regard to the civil service rules, for the reason that the Civil Service Commission was utterly unable to cope with the emergency,—that is to furnish a sufficient number of men in accordance with the regulations. This was a remarkable mistake—all the more remarkable as the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee had never taken the trouble to inform himself by application to the Civil Service Commission as to what that Commission was able to do.
The fact is, that the Commission had eligible lists ready to hand from which a large majority of the additional force needed might have been taken, and that there was enough
