will, of course, be liable to err, and he may be controlled by motives not in accord with the public interest. These are contingencies against which it is impossible to provide by any legislative contrivance. The problem is as much as possible to enlarge the power of such an officer for good, and to circumscribe his capacity and his opportunities for mischief. With a civil service law, and rules under that law stripping the chiefs of the city departments of patronage for distribution by favor, and with legal provisions cutting off the pay of persons not properly appointed, the inducement to select for these places men with a view to the use of their offices for political ends would be greatly lessened, and it is probable that gradually a custom would grow up to select men for chiefs of the departments, when such places become vacant, from the number of the professional assistants already in the service. In general, the promotion for ascertained merit from one place to another up to the top would be greatly facilitated; and it requires no argument to prove that this would redound in a high degree not only to the benefit of the service but also to the moral elevation of municipal politics.
I am very far from asserting that the mere formal introduction of the system I speak of would be a panacea for all the ills in municipal government that afflict us. No system however wisely devised will work automatically. It will require faithful and competent men to direct and watch over its working. As experience shows, no sooner is the merit system introduced anywhere in the service, than the spoils-politicians exhaust all the resources of their ingenuity in the endeavor to “beat the law.” They fight it desperately for they know that it threatens their means of subsistence. They usually succeed for a time to a certain extent, and then, taking advantage of their own wrong, they cry out that civil service reform is a
