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time for holding more examinations, and for preparing additional lists, before all that force would have been needed. These facts were actually communicated to the Senate Appropriations Committee after the Bill had passed the House, but without effect.
It has been ascertained that of the emergency appointments under the War Department without examination, about 560 were made in the Washington offices directly. It is an interesting fact that a large proportion of these persons, so appointed, were incompetent, and generally ill-suited for the work to be done. That was at the point where political pressure was strongest. On the other hand, the appointments made “in the field,” outside of the Department at Washington, were of better character. That was where the political pressure was weakest. The emergency appointments without examination made by the Navy Department were much less in number than those made by the Department of War, but on the whole, of great efficiency. The popular impression is not wrong, that, in the Navy Department, political pressure had the least effect.
While the emergencies of the War were thus taken advantage of to foist into the civil service a large number of persons without examination, the same emergencies, and the events of the War generally have really served to put the necessity of a consistent and vigorous enforcement of the merit system, wherever there is any possibility for it, into a clearer light.
The finest illustration of the virtues of the merit system is furnished by the American Navy, in its administrative as well as in its fighting force. If there be a person in the land who would favor the injection of spoils politics into that splendid organization, the American people would surely set him down as an idiot, or as a traitor. And there is hardly less unanimity of opinion as to the fact, that had there been as general an adherence to the merit principle in the management of the various branches of the military service, the heroic efforts of our soldiers would have achieved their triumphs far more easily, and been attended with far less loss and suffering. This lesson is so obvious that it should penetrate even the dullest understanding, and disarm the most plausible advocacy of spoils politics.
Can the most inventive ingenuity produce any valid reason
