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the whole system is utterly impracticable. And so on. But when the investigation is carried further, and the overwhelming preponderance of the testimony sustains the practical as well as moral excellence of the system, your spoils politician falls back upon his last resource which is indeed inexhaustible—his power of imaginative invention. It is not too much to say that “the lie well stuck to” has become a favorite weapon with the ordinary stripe of the enemies of civil service reform; and this weapon is employed with the loftiest confidence in the assumed ignorance or gullibility of the public, and the most reckless disregard of consequences as to the character for truth and veracity of the person using it.
During the long period that I have been an attentive observer of public affairs, I have witnessed many heroic dealings with the truth. But I have seldom seen men of prominent position commit themselves to statements which everybody in the slightest degree conversant with the subject knew to be untrue, with such wild imprudence as some of them do in their struggle against civil service reform. It is almost incredible, but literally true, for instance, that Senator Gallinger, of New Hampshire, with whom I have had some public correspondence, would, among other equally astounding things, stubbornly insist upon it, that under the civil service rules every candidate for the position of compositor or printer in the Public Printing office was required to hop a certain distance on one foot, as part of his examination; that all official inquiries had proved the civil service system a dead failure, and that President Cleveland had issued his order of May 6th, 1896, making large additions to the classified service, only after he had been informed of the Republican victory of the Presidential election, which took place on November 2, 1897. No wonder the organ of the spoils politicians put that Senator forth as their candidate for the vice-presidency.
Nor is it easy to believe that a member of the House of Representatives, hailing from this State, too—the Hon. C. H. Grosvenor, should, at the last session of Congress have made a speech against civil service reform which contained scores of statements of fact flagrantly untrue or misleading. Of their quality you may judge from this representative specimen: He positively asserts that the civil service law “was never intended to cover anything but the departments in Washing-
