000,000; Austria, $14,000,000,000. Since that estimate our population has increased nearly ten million, and our wealth in proportion.

There is nothing to prevent our country sweeping onward and upward to the triumphal position awaiting her, higher and broader, and more glorious than we, even with this showing, can conceive of, except some stupid and wicked policy that shall throw down all barriers and let the hordes of the world in to prey upon her magnificence, as the Goths poured in and. devastated the "Eternal City."

THE CIVIL SERVICE.

BY HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE, M. C. FROM MASS.

Two great Democratic leaders introduced the system. which made the civil service of the country an election prize, and a Republican member of Congress struck the first blow against this system after forty years of habit had rooted it deeply in our political soil. Andrew Jackson practised and William L. Marcy formulated the doctrine that to the victors belong the spoils, and the two removals of John Quincy Adams's entire term rose to two thousand in the first ten months of the rule of the hero of New Orleans.

In 1867 Mr. Thomas Allen Jenckes of Rhode Island took up the subject of the civil service, and as chairman of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment made on May 25, 1868, an exhaustive report in which he showed the rapid growth of the civil service and depicted the evils and perils of the existing system of patronage and favoritism. The defects of the system had been brought to public notice years before, and had been attacked by Calhoun and Webster. But the only result of their efforts had been the introduction of "passexaminations," which served perhaps to check the flow of absolute incompetency into the public service, but did not reach at all the root of the trouble. In the fierce struggle over slavery and in the shock of civil war minor questions of administration were lost sight of, and therefore the honor was reserved to Mr. Jenckes of being the first to take up the question thoroughly and scientifically, and to strike hard at the source of the existing evils.

Congress paid little or no attention to Mr. Jenckes. So fixed had the patronage system become, that this attack upon it was regarded as the eccentricity of an amiable enthusiast, and the author of the report found himself for the moment in that unenviable and not uncommon position known as crying in the wilderness." Mr. Jenckes, however, kept on,

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and outside of Congress that impalpable and all-powerful force known as public opinion began to awaken and take form and substance as to the civil service. So rapid was the growth of public sentiment, indeed, that President Grant in his message in 1870 called the attention of Congress to the subject, and in March, 1871, Mr. Tucker had the pleasure of drawing an amendment to an appropriation bill which gave the President authority to establish regulations for the admission of candidates to the civil service and for ascertaining their efficiency, authorized him to appoint a commission, and appropriated $25,000 for that purpose. The commission was appointed, with Mr. George William Curtis as its chairman; rules were adopted, and open competitive examinations were established in the Departments at Washington, in the custom house and partly in the post office at New York.

At the end of two years the commission made a report showing by the testimony of the heads of Departments, and by other evidence, that the system had worked well despite many difficulties and obstacles, and that the service had been improved. Meantime Congress had given a second appropriation; but when President Grant transmitted the report of the commission and asked for another appropriation, they saw that the movement had passed beyond the bounds of amiable eccentricity, and they refused to give any more money. The result was, of course, disastrous. It was impossible to carry on the work without money, and General Grant, disappointed in his own efforts and refused support by Congress, frankly abandoned the whole policy. Not being given to sham and pretense, he gave up the new scheme squarely and avowedly, and the civil service relapsed into patronage and pass-examin

ations.

Outside of Washington, however, the agitation on this subject went on with fresh and increased vigor, and the subject was pressed with especial energy at the time of the Republican Convention in 1876. The result was seen in the fact that President Hayes favored the reform strongly in his letter of acceptance, and urged suitable legislation in his inaugural and in his messages. Congress took no action, but under the administration