27
way of reducing expenses also to the people, a valuable service by putting their own employees, excepting perhaps the private secretaries, under the merit system; nor would the judicial branch be injured in dignity or in comfort, by having its employees classified too.
But these are comparatively small matters compared with what his been done, and with what is still to be done. Every administration since the enactment of the civil service law, has signalized itself by some conspicuous advance of the merit system. If the incoming administration wishes to follow this rule its ambition cannot permit itself to be satisfied with merely adding to the competitive schedule a few more hundreds, or thousands of clerks. It will have to aim much higher. It will have at least to accomplish the solution of the postmaster problem, which is the next in order. Indeed, supported by a strong public opinion in favor of thorough administrative reform, it will have the power, and it may consider it its duty, to complete the work of eliminating the spoils virus from the whole of the national service altogether. Only then will it fully equal the precedents set by its predecessors who, one after another, advanced the merit system in constantly increasing progression. And when the national service stands there purged of the spoils blemish, a living proof of the beneficent effects of civil service reform, we may expect its example presently to become irresistible to those of the State and municipal governments that are now lagging behind the onward march.
What I said of the dangers still besetting our cause may have shown you that I underestimate neither the strength nor the cunning of our opponents. But I am nevertheless convinced that their striving will be in vain. They may fight skillfully and stubbornly, but already their cause is morally lost. The question is only, if they fight on, how many dead and wounded they will leave on the field, and how many captives in our lines. Civil service reform has carried position after position, at first against apparently overwhelming odds, and with each advance its force has grown stronger and the resistance weaker. But yesterday we were only a handful, ridiculed and neglected. To-day we count well nigh the whole intelligence and moral sense of the nation as an earnest ally of our cause. I do not say that the contest is already ended,
