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Commission informs me that of the many thousands of men appointed upon competitive examination only 2 per cent, have failed to maintain the expected degree of efficiency; and, what is certainly no less important, that the number of persons among them who turned out to be dishonest has been so small as hardly to deserve notice.
But there is one point which demands the especial attention of American womanhood. The number of women employed in various capacities in the national service is very large. Under the spoils system almost every one of them owed not only her appointment, but also her continuance in office, to the recommendation, or, as it was called, to the "influence," of some man influential in party politics—in Washington usually a Senator or a Representative in Congress. With that "influence" behind her she could expect to stay in the place upon which, in most cases, depended her bread and butter. When that influence was for any reason withdrawn, she was in danger of being dismissed to make room for another woman only because that other woman had the necessary influence behind her. Surely to the most estimable women in the service—among them always women of the highest traditions and breeding—such a relation of dependence upon the favor of individual men must have been distasteful in the extreme. I need not point out the abuses which such a state of things was apt to bring forth, in order to show that the introduction of the merit system doing away with political influence was equivalent to the emancipation of the women in the service from a dependence so singularly unsuitable and so galling. Now they may be proudly conscious of the assurance that they hold their places by virtue of their own merit, and that their own merit is all the protection they need. I, therefore, commend to the high-minded women of America the cause of Civil Service Reform as a cause in which they have an especial interest. All women having the dignity of their sex at heart should be Civil Service Reformers, and resent as an insult to those of their sex
