19
least fitted to form a clear judgment of the qualifications their subordinates should have. I speak here from my own experience, for I have gone through it all. Another one of my personal observations may be of equal interest. I have known several heads of public departments who were indifferent, or even hostile, to civil service reform when they went into office but became thorough converts to it before they had been there long. Some of them frankly confessed to me that, had they had their way at the beginning of their respective administrations, they would have freely used their power of appointment to take care of their supporters, to oblige their friends, and to look out for their party; that they would have yielded to the pressure for place, sometimes willingly, sometimes because they could not resist it; that they chafed at the civil service rules restraining them; that, had they been permitted, they would gladly have disregarded them; but that as they gained better knowledge of their duties and of the requirements of the service under them, they became aware how discreditable to themselves and how hurtful to the public interest would have been the things they had at first wished to do, and that they could never be too grateful to the civil service rules for having saved them from ignorantly or improvidently falling into errors, the consequences of which would have plagued them throughout their whole administration.
Here I speak, of course, only of public officers to whom, their early misconceptions notwithstanding, the public interest was the supreme consideration. But what will happen if men who persist in regarding public place as the mere spoil of party warfare, and their official power as a legitimate means for serving the “machine,” are put at the head of public departments and entrusted with the management of civil service examinations? Can there be the slightest doubt that they would eagerly embrace every opportunity to disembowel the merit system, to make sport of the examinations, to give the freest possible play to spoils politics, behind the empty forms of the competitive rule, and to make the constitutional mandate a laughing stock for the “boys”? If anybody doubts, let him consider what has already happened. Last year the majority of the Fire Commission of New York city was composed of men of the spoils persuasion. Owing to the watchfulness of the City Civil Service Board they failed, in spite of
