30
the partisan activity of public officers very much to decrease, so that at present there is far less of this abuse than at any time since the Civil Service Law went in force.
These are improvements the great value of which no Civil Service Reformer will fail to appreciate. Nor will any fair-minded man deny that, despite such isolated delinquencies as we witness at present in the Treasury Department, the Civil Service Law has under the national Government on the whole been faithfully enforced—more faithfully perhaps than any law ever was enforced that had so much of adverse interest and popular habit to encounter.
But the national Government is not the only field on which Civil Service Reform has achieved its success. In Massachusetts, that State to whose enlightened public spirit the country owes so much of valuable example, a Civil Service law is in wholesome operation, comprehending not only the State service, but also that of the large municipalities. One of the most important features of the Massachusetts system consists in the registration of laborers, enabling the laboring man, if he is fit for it, to obtain public employment without subjecting himself to the tyranny of partisan control or becoming a slavish tool of a party machine—a system which cannot be too carefully studied by those interested in municipal reform. In Massachusetts it has worked so satisfactorily to the community, as well as to the laboring men themselves, that, as I am informed, in spite of the ever unsatisfied appetites of the spoils politicians, no political party would now dare openly to countenance its overthrow.
In New York, too, there has been a Civil Service law on the statute-book, covering the service of the State as well as that of the larger cities. It was enacted in 1883 under Mr. Cleveland's Governorship, and put in operation by him in good faith. But the lamb was at the tender mercies of the wolf while David B. Hill and Roswell P. Flower occupied the Governor's chair. The violations and evasions of the law became at last so daring and shameless, that at the instance of the Civil Ser-
