THE CONDITIONS OF CIVIL SERVICE MORALITY IN AMERICA.
j ERY dreary reading is the story of the exposure of V corruption in the United States Post Office told in the Times of Saturday last. Half-a-dozen or more of the higher officials of that great Department have been actually declared guilty on inquiry, or lie under the gravest sus- picion, of practices totally incompatible with sound ad- ministration, and in several cases with personal honour. The abuses discovered range from the provision of free. delivery of letters—by no means so universal a privilege in the States as it is with us—in a partial and one-sided fashion, dictated by personal or political considerations, up, or down, to the acceptance of bribes for appointments or promotions in the Service, and of heavy commissions on large purchases of such requisites as letter-box fasteners and automatic cashiers" at ridiculously high prices. It will be readily believed that these discoveries have pro- duced a painful sensation in American society. There is no Department of the public Service in which an ex- posure of untrustworthiness on the part of leading officials is so certain to produce widespread and profound dis- comfort and uneasiness as in the working of the Post Office. Even if, as seems to be the case in this instance, there is no allegation of any actual tampering with correspondence, it is impossible that the public should not feel that there is only a difference of detail between breach of trust by officials in relation to the general conduct of the Post Office and meddling, whether for political purposes or for objects of mere sordid dishonesty, with the letters placed in its charge. And certainly, if the higher functionaries are notoriously unscrupulous in the fulfilment of the obliga- tions devolving upon them, those of the lower grades cannot but be expected to include considerable numbers who will turn to their own advantage, whether as black- mailers or as common thieves, the opportunities constantly in their hands.
But beyond these special grounds for public depression and indignation in. the Post Office exposures, the people of the United States can hardly fail to recognise in them very serious cause for anxiety as to the general condition of their public Service. There is no obvious reason why a lower level of honesty should prevail in the Post Office than in other branches of the Federal Service. It has never been alleged that association with the working of the mails has any such mysteriously deteriorating influence on the moral fibre as is commonly alleged to result from much connection with transactions in horses. Except for quite rare cases of peculation, the Post Office of civilised countries is generally quite as honestly managed as any ether Department of State administration. No doubt it id always possible that in the staff• of any particular public office, as among the officers of a regiment, the undergraduates of a college, or the boys of a school, a moral infection may be set up due to the influence of one or two strong bad characters. But that does not seem to be the kind of explanation which occurs to those who on the spot contemplate the ugly spectacle of the Post Office scandals. If it were so, the severe measures adopted against most, if not all, of the principal offenders would produce a pretty general assurance that much, if not all, of the poison had been purged away. But such clearly is not the feeling. A very considerable number of striking " examples " have been made ; absolute profes- sional ruin has fallen on several men who stood high in the Service ; and. yet no security is felt that the same kind of malpractices will not before long crop up again. Why should this be so ? Not, so far as can be Judged, because the United States Post Office is manned by a worse type of official than the other Departments of the Federal Service. Nor, certainly, because the average conscience of the American citizen in regard to civic duty is naturally at a lower level than that of the average citizen of this country. It is because the manner in which the American party system has for two generations been allowed to operate in connection with the Civil Service has been pre- cisely calculated, on the one hand, to deteriorate the standard of administrative duty, and, on the other hand, to enhance the temptations pressing upon men with small incomes to augment those incomes illegitimately. Fitness for the work in hand has not been the primary criteriof applied to the credentials of candidates, but work done, or mfluence available, for the promotion of party ends. That being notoriously so, the question whether the Departmental work in hand. has been well or ill done by those appointed ostensibly to do it has been very often considered and treated by them and their superiors as a purely secondary, and even quite insignificant, issue. If they have con- tinued, as they have had opportunity, to give the party a friendly and efficient lift, that has been quite enough to secure not only retention of office, but promotion there, so long as their party remained in power. But only so long. When the other side came in, the odious application first given, or first given on an extensive scale, by Andrew Jackson to the motto, "To the victors belong the spoils," has received full force ; and wherever any excuse, and very often where none, could be found the holders of office down to the village post- master have been ejected, without compensation or pension, to make room for the friends of the incoming party. The more useful the office-holders have made themselves to the antagonists of that party, the more sure they have been of finding themselves cast forth upon the world. In these circumstances, nothing could be more natural, or, indeed, inevitable, than that very many should be tempted, and that many should yield to the temptation, to make provision for their compulsory retirement at the expense of the Department and the country they were supposed to be serving. The system was exactly framed for the production of unjust stewards. It would. produce them anywhere, and it has produced extensive crops of them in America. For a good many years past the evil has been recognised there, and more than one Presidential candi- date has waved the flag of Civil Service reform, with the inscriptions "Security of tenure" and "Selection and promotion by merit" emblazoned on its folds. More or less earnest efforts have, doubtless, been made in some cases to realise these aspirations, and something, we may reasonably believe, has been achieved. But it has been achieved with great difficulty, and at the cost of severe struggles with the managers of the political "machine." To them the loss of the means of rewarding party services by the promise of office, or of promotion in office, meant the deprivation of a very large part of their motive-power, and they fought with great persistence against so paralysing a deprivation. Probably there has been a continuous conflict between the forces of progress and reaction in most Departments of the Federal Service, the balance of victory resting sometimes with the re- formers, sometimes with the supporters, of the bad old system. In the Post Office the reformers may have made way at one time, but latterly they have, it is' clear, sus- tained severe reverses. Reviewing the teaching of the recent exposures, the writer of the Times' account of them says that "undoubtedly the purging of the Departmeut from politics is the most urgent necessity," and that the officials whose names are associated with the scandals which have been brought to light "have simply been turning the Post Office into a wheel of the machine."
Nothing but the thoroughgoing emancipation of the whole Civil Service from this degrading bondage can possibly be effective towards securing for the United States that standard of morality in their public offices which is worthy of their best traditions and ours. We have such a standard here simply because the conditions of service in our public offices are such as to harmonise with those dictates of per- sonal honour which, we doubt not, are naturally as clear and imperative in the case of our American kinsmen as with ourselves. Substantial salaries, certainty of tenure during good behaviour, and promotion by a mixture of the principles of seniority and merit, secure in the British Civil Service both a high level of intelligence and ability, and exemption from so much as the breath of suspicion of corrupt practices. It is no doubt open to question whether the principle of personal responsibility for Departmental failures might not with advantage be brought into more active operation than is now the case with us ; and possibly, on the other hand, there might be greater scope and stimulus for the evolution of original resource than is ordinarily afforded in some branches of our public Depart- ments. But as a means for securing honourable, loyal, and generally efficient service our system is without ques- tion infinitely superior to that which prevails in the United States. One cannot but hope that President Roosevelt, whose own strenuous devotion to the service of his country has afforded so admirable an example to the cultivated and leisured classes of his fellow-citizens, will make the recon- struction of the American Civil Service on sound and wholesome lines one of the main features of his policy in the ensuing Presidential campaign. He has had a great deal to do with bringing about that effective exposure of abuses which has so gravely shocked American public opinion, and he is in a position of exceptional advantage for persuading his countrymen to lay to heart and reduce to practical and permanent form the lessons which have thus painfully but surely been forced on their attention.
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