reasonable and unreasonable, not only by political pressure but by its accustomed weapons of industrial warfare, is to put the Government itself into a class rivalry with an organized section of its own citizens. Such an association goes far toward turning Government workers into a Prætorian Guard. In face of this situation the Congressional Joint Commission submitted a bill that failed to provide the much needed comprehensive employment system, but contained what was thought the temper of Congress would stand. Nearly three years have passed with nothing accomplished. Congress is apathetic, departmental jealousies are influential, and the employees' organization, while insistent on redress of grievances, is cold toward thoroughgoing systematization, or anything that promises weeding out of inefficiency. It sees none. And as an organization it flourishes and gains members so long as it agitates for advance to the Promised Land, without entering it. Shortly before his election, President Harding wrote: The time has come for the federal government to organize its agencies of employment in accordance with the principles which have been tested and approved by the best modern business practice. It is outrageous for public administration, which should be an example and a guide to our people, to indulge in waste and extravagant inefficiency. Though the necessity for a budget system is great, perhaps even greater is the need for a system which will give federal employes a square deal in promotions, pay and continuity of service while obtaining for the nation's taxpayers, in return, a high standard of skill and continued loyalty among the employes who serve them. That is not an extravagant programme. It is perfectly possible of realization, at least so far as a Government, which is not under the necessity of earning profits, can be made to function with the business precision of private industry. First, it is necessary to abolish the divided authority that comes from one body supervising admission to the service while others study questions of efficiency. The United States Civil Service Commission should receive power adequate to the establishment of a national employment system. The whole personnel question should be put in its hands and the various executive officers relieved of having to deal with it piecemeal, just as such officers in great industrial establishments are relieved of it. Then, if endowed with sufficient power and money, the Commission, always subject to the limits of a budget, could be expected to grade the service so that salaries would be related to the character of employment and equal pay would be given for equal work. Many salaries are now too low, others too high, and the differences between departments and even different persons in the same office are a galling injustice. At present the work of the lowest grade of filing clerk is carried on under 105 different titles, with 25 different rates of pay. The proper grouping of places would correct this and make for better methods of testing fitness and for economy of examinations. It would provide a standardized, mobile force that could be sent from one department to another as need arose, thus avoiding the extravagant overmanning of offices to meet their peak loads. Great opportunity exists for the development of the examination system in the light of psychologic research and the experience of modern business, but the Commission has lacked funds. The whole matter of Federal promotions is in chaos, and the Civil Service Commission is without authority. A system of promotion examinations should be established and incident to it a system of efficiency records that would open the door to earned advancement or deserved dismissal. The entire task of perfecting entrance tests, determining relative efficiency in the service, providing opportunities for advancement, and discovering the unfit should be brought under one centralized control. The apathy or tenderheartedness of appointing officers, who would not have hesitated to make political removals under the spoils system, with respect to inefficient classified subordinates, brings a heavy burden on the taxpayers and undeserved discredit on the merit system. All these are necessary preliminary steps toward the development of a really scientific personnel system. The whole field of public service outside of the heads of departments and such subordinates as are concerned in determining public policies must be co-ordinated and taken out of the category of party patronage. Beyond lies the more difficult question of machinery for the redress of grievances. Some believe that the Civil Service Commission should provide this. Others believe that discipline can only be enforced by leaving arbitrary power with office heads. But whatever mean may be taken between these two extremes, certainly some way must be found to secure fair consideration of the often reasonable complaints of employees, to open the door to suggestions for improvement by them and give them that legitimate influence over the conditions of their employment that enlightened private industry no longer denies. Take away from them pressure to affiliate with outside organizations because no other instrument for self protection seems to be at their hands, and such affiliation can be forbidden. Indeed it will scarcely need to be forbidden, for the alliance is not a natural one. But unless measures are taken to give employees a sense of fair treatment and partnership in their work, so that they are no longer mute and helpless under arbitrary superiors and a far-away and indifferent Congress, this alliance will continue with increasing menace. The Civil Service reforms of 1883 checked customs that threatened to swamp American statemanship and turn American politics into a mere base struggle for spoils. But the work is not finished. In more than three-fourths of the States of the Union the spoils system still dominates administration and bedevils politics. Down into the city and county services of a larger part of the country the political parties reach for the nourishment with which they build their organizations. There can come no healthy politics of ideas from creatures so fed. President Butler of Columbia University recently declared that "today the division of office holders, office seekers, and the voting public into Republicans and Democrats means little or nothing except struggle for public place and public authority". He strikingly drew attention to the lack of fundamental differences between the parties and made a plea for such reconstruction that they may really function as the exponents of vital and clearly differentiated principles. But how can sincerity and courage in the exposition of ideas, or even an agreement on national party policy, be expected from parties made up of State, county and city organizations dominated by and in turn largely concerned with the patronage of their own localities? The establishment of the Federal merit system only half rescues national politics from the dictation of the spoilsmen so long as all these reservoirs of spoils remain. They permit the building up of organizations of voters lacking common principles and held together only by the cohesive power of patronage. These organizations in turn make up the national parties and stand for such small measure of ideas as can be rescued from the conflict of their local opinions, controlled chiefly by an eye on local spoils. Not until the whole field of politics, local as well as national, is freed from this misuse of government to build up party machinery can national parties be made effective instruments for carrying out political principles. The British parliamentary system facilitates the division of the electorate on single, sharply defined issues. There questions of local administration and struggles for local power are largely separated from national politics and the voter's attention can be concentrated on the single matter of choosing his representation in the House of Commons, while here the voter is confronted by a complication of National, State and municipal considerations and by the necessity of selecting a large number of officials at the same time. Consequently his party alignment may mean little or nothing as an index of opinion. Yet England found the corruption of patronage threatening to destroy the free play of opinion and the achievement of the national political will. Even before the passage of the Reform Bill a beginning of examinations was made in self defense by officers to prevent the destruction of their own administration by the pressure of their own party incompetents. Now the competitive system practically excludes partisanship from administrative work. Far more is it necessary for the United States, with its highly complex political machinery, to free public opinion from the deadening influence of patronage and office from the burden of incompetence. This is not the fad of Civil Service reformers, a dream of Utopia. It is a programme that, wherever applied, has made for more efficient and more representative government. It must be the vital concern of American democracy, unless democracy is ready to see its ideals stifled and its substance wasted by the administrative machinery created for its service. ROSCOE C. E. BROWN. CIVILIZATION AND THE FRENCH THEATRE BY STARK YOUNG THE characteristically national art of the theatre in France, which is that of the Comédie Française, goes back to the Mediterranean. It derives from the Greek. Its outlines may be less august and spacious; its plastic quality infinitely less magnificent; its religion less profound and less political than the Greek; but the kinship remains. In smaller, and certainly in different, forms its instinct for finish parallels the Greek instinct. Its thinking turns on a sense of forces operant in the universe, or in society at least, that act upon individuals and bring on their struggle with themselves and with law or fate or universal nature. The action of these forces together determines the outlines of life, and within these outlines are included the nuance and detail of every individual and event. Art, following such a conception of the world, goes therefore to types, to large patterns within which are included and expressed the variety of human experience. This classical conception of living is like those charts of mariners that lead to conceived and desired ends, to harbors and over tracks that have been plotted out. Under these lines of purpose and direction lies the sea, a ceaseless, ungoverned passion of energy and eternal power, an unfathomed and inexhaustible mystery of being, a boundless vitality and danger. But the chart remains and man's navigation may be informed by it. There are ports foreseen and attainable for the voyage he must make, whatever his will is or the weariness and perplexity of his heart. The art that follows such a conception is by its own nature driven to find its charts and possible ways. It plots out, above the immense and inexhaustible sources of human nature and living, an order, a plan, a course in art that will bring us to rational and sweet harbors, and into ports and havens from which we may look out over the ocean with some consolation of under |