The Civil Service

Report of MR. JENCKES, of Rhode Island, from the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment, made to the House of Representatives of the United States, May 14, 1868. Washington : Government Printing-Office.

MR JENCKF.S proposes that our civil service shall be improved by admitting candidates for executive appointment to competitive examination, and keeping them in place during good behavior, with the just hope and incentive of promotion, and he has therefore reported a bill for the establishment of a Department of the Civil Service, under the direction of the Vice-President of the United States, and embodying the idea of merit and efficiency in the public employees.

The present volume contains matter which makes it far more interesting than most of the ephemeral — we wish we could call them light — publications of the Government Printing-office. It opens with a report of the Committee on Retrenchment, which is an historical notice of the management of the Civil Service before the election of General Jackson, and its enduring corruption under him by the introduction of the principle of rotation in office ; to this report is appended an extract from Mr. Parton’s “ Life of Jackson,” pertinent to the business ; and then follows a series of questions addressed by the committee to persons now in nearly all branches of the Civil Disservice, and practically acquainted with the workings of the present system, and their answers to the questions; after which we have the opinions of the earlier presidents, testimonies of the press, full notices of the civil services in China, Prussia, England, and France, and two speeches of Mr. Jenckes, arguing in a plain, straightforward way the advantages of the proposed changes in our own system.

The replies of the employees to the Committee’s questions are noticeable as favoring in nearly all cases the passage of Mr. Jenckes’s bill ; though one of its provisions is that no one now in the government service shall be promoted without undergoing an examination, while any appointee below the grade of those confirmed by the Senate may be summoned before the examining board, and dismissed for incompetency. We may suppose a reasonable share of public spirit and of patriotism has prompted them, and that those favoring Mr. Jenckes’s bill are as sincere as those opposing it. What seems to be the principal objection to it comes from a gentleman who conceives of the proposed civil service establishment as in the nature of a standing army, and who argues that the employees of the government are better for want of preparation, since in the late war those officers and soldiers drawn from the “farm, the office, and the workshop,” were “ often superior to hot-bed growths of a permanent military-service establishment,” like Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas. Moreover, having served in the comptroller’s office at Washington, he is able to say that the old clerks who had been in place twenty and fifty years constituted “a ‘ circumlocution office,’ such as was satirized by Dickens ” ; and he tells of a " fresh, active, and hopeful young clerk,”who, having been appointed in the usual way for no reason, expected to be as logically dismissed in four years, but did more work in a day than any two of the “ civil -service men” did in a week. In a word, this gentleman makes as ingenious an argument for the measure he opposes as its friends would wish to see. We should hardly be willing to accept the “ civil-service men” whom he knew in the comptroller’s office as prophetical of the effects to be produced by Mr. Jenckes’s system, since they were in fact the withered fruit ot the old principle of rotation, chosen for no other reason than their political friendship with the President who appointed them. Under the proposed civil-service law, nothing would be easier than to summon them before the examining board, and dismiss such couples of them as it took a week to do one day’s work. We doubt, moreover, whether the quadrennial accession of ignorance and inexperience will cut the toils of red-tape in the departments, or deliver us from circumlocution there. On the contrary, we suspect, from all this gentleman says, that nothing is so much needed for the rescue of the civil government from dishonesty and incompetency as competitive examination of all candidates for executive appointment, and strict surveillance afterwards of their work and Character, with promotion in view on the right hand, and dismissal from place on the left. Every sincere man who has held a government office must own that it would have been well for him if thorough preparation for its duties had been first required of him, and he cannot deny that the possibility of advance in reward for zeal and efficiency would have been an agreeable ally to his conscience in the discharge of those duties. Every rogue and incompetent now in place must gratefully celebrate the fortune that gave him position because he was a Johnson man, and must regard with trembling the probable passage of a law which shall deal with him as a bad man or a useless one. The establishment of a civil service upon the basis proposed by Mr. Jenckes would not only afford greater efficiency to the governmental business at home and abroad for vastly less money than is now spent on it, but would greatly tend to purify the unwholesome body politic. It would teach the people that presidential elections were held for the purpose of directing the course of the government, not for changing all its machinery ; that administrations are organic through the popular will, not through the clerks in the department. It would teach that while office-holding may be a career, office-seeking must cease to be so; it would prevent the ignorant from offering themselves for places they cannot fill, and we hope it would abash many lazy and worthless ward and school-district politicians from their present ambition to rule, or at least to feed upon, the nation.