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ations to secure permanent appointees have then been discouraged, has been referred to.
As the Civil Service Commission depends on the department officers for a statement of the duties for which specific qualifications are desired, and for other information necessary in fixing the scope of an examination, it will readily be seen that where the department refuses utterly to co-operate, the provisions of the law cannot be enforced. The Department of Justice has followed this same plan in the appointment of clerks and others made in the offices of United States District Attorneys and Marshals. In other departments and offices, notably in the San Francisco Custom House, persons have been appointed to positions nominally in the “excepted” list and then assigned to other duties, while the “excepted” duties are performed by old employees under classified titles.
The tricks employed in getting rid of employees whose places are desired, have been quite as various. In many cases men have been laid off, ostensibly “for lack of work,” while immediately afterward their positions have been filled by others who perform the identical duties. In other cases the reasons stated in nominal compliance with the President's order of July, 1897, have been so plainly of the “trumped up” sort as to call forth indignant protests not only from the Civil Service Commission but from the inspecting officers of the departments themselves. In still others employees have been given an “indefinite furlough without pay,” and their places quickly filled by persons appointed to do the same work “ in the absence of eligible lists.”
These are not secret matters. Many of these occurrences are reviewed in the last published annual report of the Civil Service Commission, 127 pages of which are devoted to them. The most serious fact is that such cases, remaining uncorrected, are permitted to stand as precedents of the most vicious and demoralizing sort.
This is an unwelcome exhibition which I should be most happy not to be obliged to spread before you. But however unpalatable that duty may be, it must be done. The President's good intentions are not to be questioned. But those intentions are evidently treated with reckless disrespect by some of the officers under him who by their evil practices burden him with re-
