of such service as I can; if not, that I will return home, leaving that definite message with them to make use of when they have exhausted the dangerous experiments in which they are engaged."
That would have sounded a clear note, and if Mr. Root had gone under those conditions, he would have given Russia a clear, definite and constructive message. But instead we sent a large commission, at great expense, without a definite message, and the result is, to say the least, extremely unsatisfactory.
The judgment displayed in sending Root and Russell together on a governmental mission was as unsound as it would have been to send Dwight L. Moody and Bob Ingersoll together to put on an evangelistic campaign, or to have sent Jim Hill and Eugene V. Debs together to manage the construction of a railway system.
All so-called efficiency commissions with which I am familiar—and I have had years of experience in the public service—remind me of the ironical definition given by Job Hedges, that "efficiency is letting some one else run your business as they want to at your expense." Efficiency, like the word liberty, has been overworked by impostors.
Civil service commissions were heralded as agencies that would usher in the millennium of
