which moreover relieve Brown from the fearful responsibility of fastening upon the public service a worthless person, and Jones from temptations to which he may not be subjected in remaining a loafer and good-for-nothing in private life. If the Jenckes bill fails to pass, how is the state to be protected? Is Brown to be held responsible for the delinquencies of his protégé, and for the money which Jones draws from the people, without giving in return for it adequate, efficient, faithful work?

Surely somebody ought to be held. responsible. In the present chaos and demoralization nobody is responsible; nay, Jones pleads that he has to feather his nest, because he may be turned out when Black turns out Brown; and thus the hard-working people are the only sufferers in this palladium of Liberty, as they are in the strongholds of despotism.

The statistics of all these cases are selfevident. In an isolated evil, the public might withhold their verdict until the facts are proven and authenticated. But here we have to deal with a wide-spread evil, which defrauds the country in the collection of taxes on a scale so gigantic that the commissioners of revenue, collectors, assessors, and Treasury officers -at least those of them who are honest -bow their heads in shame and despair. We have to deal with an evil that is manifest here and there and everywhere. To present particular instances of it, would be to claim the space of several annual volumes of this magazine, without exhausting the documentary evidence. All that can be attempted by the publicist on the first wrestling with this myriad-armed evil, is to reveal not only the fact of its existence, which every American knows, but-and what is more painful-to disclose, also, the fact that no remedy has been so far proposed for its diminution, if not eradication, excepting that contained in the Jenckes Civil Service bill.

It will be seen at a glance that the bill does not go far enough. The Constitution vesting in the President the

appointing power, by and with the coDsent of the Senate, the bill could only primarily deal with those subordinate officers who are appointed by the heads of departments. But it contains a provision which enables the Senate to be guided in its confirmation or rejection of persons nominated to that body by the Executive by an examination test to which these persons may, in the judgment of the Senate, be subjected, together with the candidates for subordinate offices.

The bill goes probably as far as it can go under the present Constitutional limitations, and as a first instalment of reformatory measures. Mr. Senator Patterson, of New Hampshire, is to introduce a similar bill for the reform of the foreign service.

The adoption of these two bills would effect, however, only a partial reform.

To consolidate it, a reorganization of some of the public departments is indispensable. The Treasury Department, for instance, controls the customs, the revenue offices, the statistical bureau, apart from the multitudinous branches of the Treasury proper, including the currency and printing bureau. In giving to one man the control of such an immense caravansary of offices, and of the corresponding patronage, a bureaucratic despotism is built up in the midst of free institutions, which, whenever a President is hostile to the popular will, may easily be used as a formidable weapon against the People. It must be borne in mind that, when the Treasury Department was established, it could not have been anticipated that, after a few generations, the population would increase from a few millions to forty millions, and that the dominion of the Republic would spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The men appointed as secretaries of the Treasury are selected by the President, to be sure, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate; but while their politics are well known and primarily determine their selection, they are generally taken

but it is almost impossible to peruse any of them without missing the compact and pregnant utterance of master minds without being overwhelmed with titanic statistics barren of practical illustration and of suggestive, fertile ideas. One and the same bureaucratic mechanism pervades them all, and very naturally so, because there is not one presiding mind in any of the departments which is not tainted with the miasma of drudgery, or which has thought or leisure to rise to a statesmanlike and philosophical exposition of the interests to which the reports refer.

The multiplicity and bulk of the present reports are so colossal, that they are but little read by the masses of the people. In this country, where time is money more than anywhere else, and where leisure is exceptional, official reports should be concise, telling, pithy, compact, comprehensive. Instead of having, as at present, a hundred different reports from the various bureaus and offices of the great departments, the presiding ministers should digest and unite and condense them all, and present them to the country in a readable, suggestive shape. The Agricultural report is at present worked up in the Interior Department; the Commercial report, in the State Department; again, there is the Land Office report, &c., &c.,-Land, Agriculture, Commerce and Navigation, Census, Statistics, Customs, and Industry presided over by one mind, might be merged into one and the same report, and thus exhibit to the country a complete picture of its great resources; while the minister of Finance would do the same as regards revenue, currency, and finance. Hundreds of thousands of dollars would

thus be saved to the country. The gain would not only be pecuniary, but also intellectual and encouraging to the development of our resources and civilization.

The growth of the country has been so spasmodic that the organization of its public service has also taken a spas

modic turn. Bureaus have been piled upon bureaus in chaotic masses, until the Treasury and Interior have grown up to be unwieldy laboratories, in which ill-directed forces are pell-mell thrown together, all working for the elaboration and administration of the financial, fiscal, commercial, territorial, and industrial resources of the country, but in a manner so disjointed that agriculture is divorced from land, commerce from industry, while Indians, and pensions for soldiers and sailors, are under the same administration with inventions, penitentiaries and insane asylums. Add to all this the absence of all tests of qualification in the chief and subordinate officers, the irresponsibility pervading all these bureaus from the subterranean caverns to the loopholes near the roof, and no emotion should prevail but that of unalloyed though negative admiration that, in the midst of such a saturnalia of chaos and irresponsibility, there are not more frauds perpetrated, and not more blunders committed. That, however, among the mass of the men thus employed, there should have been so few to expose the anomalies of the public service, is a less encouraging symptom. It seems almost as if Americans, born to shift for themselves, in the full exercise of their independence, become unhinged from the moment they don the livery and settle down in the drudgery of office, not only like automatons, akin to those which haunt the Bank of England and Doctors' Commons, but with all the despair of disappointed freemen. An exploration through the caverns and labyrinths of the Interior and Treasury Departments resembles, in some respects, that through asylums for the aged and the infirm. Not that excessive brightness and buoyancy could be expected in public offices, but the aspect of excessive desolation is only accountable by the fact that intellect is too much excluded and all is reduced to the level of a mechanical workshop, without even imparting to the inmates the healthy glow of men engaged in arduous manual labor.

Another cause is the crowding together of many bureaus in one and the same building; the want of ventilation; the miasma engendered in the Treasury building by the printing workstead and the smoke of the burnt notes. Hence the livid appearance of many of the poor clerks. Hence, also, the appearance of debility and somnolescence. At the same time the absence of all prospect of promotion crushes ambition and begets discouragement, while the dependence of clerks, in some instances, upon questionable and ill-qualified chiefs of bureau, culminates frequently in a climax of boundless disgust. These details are somewhat painful, but they show that the total absence of presiding minds causes as much neglect in the exercise of the most common duties of humanity, as in that of a statesmanlike organization. The department needs depletion of the buildings, consolidation of bureaus, and reduction of forces, with presiding ministers relieved from drudgery, and with chiefs and subordinates of bureaus appointed upon the principle of probation, examination and promotion, and removal only for cause, as indicated in the Jenckes bill.

By reducing the number of bureaus, and the forces, a great saving will be effected; and a still greater one, by increasing the pay of competent officers, and removing all those who are useless and worthless. Deputy-ships in the Postal service should be altogether abolished; and the postmaster who absents himself from his post without leave of absence in urgent emergencies, should forfeit it. The principle which prevails in the Prussian service, of requiring bonds, varying according to the respective salaries, from all officers, high or low, might be also advantageously introduced, so that, in cases of delinquency, the people would be, at all events, protected against loss.

The first duty of the new civil service department proposed in the Jenckes bill should be to elaborate measures for the reorganization of the whole service, with a view to secure greater economy

and efficiency in all its branches. Congress could never undertake such a colossal task. It could only be carried out by a distinct department devoted to the organization of the public service, and to that alone. The task of unravelling the accumulated blunders and mismanagements of several generations is not an easy one. It requires the cooperation of the best minds of the country, but could only be well done by a few well-chosen men devoting themselves exclusively to this work. A great number of men, such as are congregated in Congress, could only make the confusion worse confounded, by each one urging pet schemes mixed up with political considerations--fatal to a work which is purely one of administrative science and organization. Millions on millions are at present wasted upon many useless bureaus, and the reports they publish.

Apart from the demoralization diffused by the present system of appointing political mercenaries, without regard to capacity and integrity, it entails upon the people fearful losses in the shape of frauds and uncollected revenues, and an extravagant expenditure in subsidizing the protégés of legislative and executive officers.

This consideration cannot fail to have weight even with those who regard the infusion of culture in the public service as incompatible with the rude impulses of a rough-and-tumble democracy. But those who hold this last-mentioned opinion are doing great injustice to great numbers of our young men, who are deterred from entering the public service, because, under the present circumstances, a political price seems to be set upon ignorance, while rascality is far from being regarded as a disqualification.

The contemplated reform would, moreover, react upon the very fountain-heads of education, and from the moment that the civil service becomes a career, the presidents of our universities, colleges, and schools would awaken to the necessity of giving greater prominence to those studies which fit for the civil

service, and which, at present, are not practically pursued from a professional point of view.

We have chiefly referred to those great departments of Washington which need most the axe of the reformer. It is hardly necessary to speak of the New York Custom-house. It is a most awful concern, with a dark history, and a perfect hotbed of sinecures. A good and honest man appointed to it, after the withdrawal of Hiram Barney, was soon found in the East River, with stones round his neck--a fit emblem of the burden that had fastened upon his distracted soul. It is a place full of tragedy and full of farce. It is probably the only custom-house in the world which also serves the purpose of a political penitentiary and partisan lazaretto. No one man should be entrusted with the control of such an unfathomable abyss of corruption. Half a dozen custom-houses, the directors respectively under the control of a minister of finance or commerce in Washington, would probably do infinitely less harm than the present one-man-power concern, and that one man perpetually vibrating like a tormented spirit between the White House, the Treasury, Foreign Missions, and incidentally the Custom-house-a profitable customer, at any rate, for railroads and hotels.

Custom-houses, surveyorships, and naval port offices all over the country, are all more or less "rotten boroughs." On certain occasions whole gangs of men are ejected, and new recruits enlisted. Such are the contrivances by which demagoguery saps morality and drags politics into the mire of venality. What is needed on certain occasions, are a great number of votes, so as to turn the scale upon the partisan adversary; and lo! all of a sudden, hundreds of men, many of whom are hard-working, and have large families to support, are thrown destitute upon the streets like so many leprous dogs, to make place for new and more serviceable recruits, who, on some future occasion, are to be ejected in the same brutal manner. As usual, the cruelty

of the demagogue strikes most remorselessly the poorest and most helpless of employees, because they are in numerical preponderance, and so they tell as voters, though they are treated as if they were unworthy to be men.

No doubt, there will still be imperfections and blemishes in our public service in ages hence, after our present system has been purged of some of its most hideous and revolting features. We dare also say, that all which is bad in our system looks still worse than it is, because every thing in this country comes to the surface in all its unsophisticated nakedness, and is not glossed over, as in older and more subtle and hypocritical civilizations, by all sort and manner of artifices. But nothing can explain away that which is intrinsically and irretrievably bad, and all good citizens should cry, "Shame!" upon each and every politician who, for selfish purposes of his own, opposes and baffles the reformatory measures now pending before Congress. Heaven knows that they are wide of the mark. They only touch a few springs of a vast and complex machinery of evil, but we are thankful that something is done in the right direction. To withhold assent from these bills because they do not remedy all the evils, would be as wise as to decline medical assistance for one disease, because there are other diseases in the body for which it does not also afford remedy.

We have not yet spoken of the State Department. It presents a sense of unity which is due to its peculiar functions, and transacts its vast business with a smallness of forces which is creditable to it, and shows how much more is to be achieved by a small force harmoniously employed, than by large forces scattered over unwieldy and chaotic organizations.

In respect to the consular service, how ever, the Department indulges in the erroneous belief that it is self-supporting. The fact is, that the fee raised upon the certificates of exporters is a tax upon commerce which the consumer has to pay. If the fee were one hundred dol