The "Machine" and the Civil Service.

"No question of internal administration," wrote Mr. Theodore Roosevelt some ten years ago, "is so important to the United States as the question of Civil Service Reform, because the spoils system which can only be supplanted through the agencies which have found expression in the Act creating the Civil Service Commission, has been for seventy years the most potent of all the forces tending to bring about the degradation of our politics. . . . Civil Service reform is not merely a movement to better the public service. It achieves this end, too; but its main purpose is to raise the tone of public life, and it is in this direction that its effects have been of incalculable good to the whole community." As one who bad just served six years on the Civil Service Commission of which he speaks, Mr. Roosevelt enjoyed an exceptional authority, which has since been increased by his persistent and fearless antagonism as a politician to the power of the machine and the spoils system, and by his practice as President squaring with his professions as a free lance. Through the labours of such men as he, the politics of his country are steadily emerging from the degradation into which the spoils system has plunged them for so many years; but it cannot be alleged by the most ardent admirer of Mr. Seddon's rule that he has helped the polities of New Zealand along the same path. The name of spoils system has never become acclimatised in this country, but the thing itself has struck its roots very deep in our soil nevertheless. "The essential features of the system are," says Mr. Bryce, "that a place in the public service is held at the absolute pleasure of the appointing authority; that it is invariably bestowed from party motives on a party man, as a reward for party services (whether of the appointee or of some one who pushes him); that no man expects to hold it any longer than his party holds power; and that this gives him the strongest personal reasons for fighting in the party ranks," The professional politician is described as the first crop of the spoils system, and the boss as the second—the boss who page 8 "wins and holds power by the bestowal of patronage."

Everybody who knows anything of our politics will recognise in this description the symptoms of our own disease; and though we may congratulate ourselves upon the fact that we are still far from the depth of corruption which has been reached in America, our complacency should be disturbed by the reflection that conditions are as obviously growing worse here as in America they are growing better. Twenty years ago the freedom of American practice was sufficient to allow the Vice-President of the United States to say that he "wished to take the boys in out of the cold to warm their toes," meaning thereby, says Mr. Roosevelt, "that he wished to distribute offices among the more active heelers." In New Zealand our politicians have never been quite so outspoken, but the farming of billets has nevertheless become one of their principal functions. On one occasion of especial candour Mr, Seddon went so far as to say that "other things being equal" he believed in giving appointments to men of his own party, and, though the higher offices have on the whole been well filled, the "other things" have been so often equal in the case of the competition for the humbler positions that the service has been packed with the friends and supporters of the Ministry whose tenure, like that of the American "heeler" whom the boss invites to come in out of the cold, is contingent upon a continuance of their political allegiance. Of the activity of that allegiance the experience of every contested election in this city or its suburbs during the last ten years has provided sufficient evidence. The Civil servant proper, whose primary qualification is that of competence, measured by examination and not political subservience, wisely exercises a silent vote on these occasions; but the temporary clerk, who is appointed without examination to-day and may be removed by Ministerial [unclear: d] favour to-morrow, is restrained [unclear: by] such scruples. He has, on the contrary as Mr. Bryce says, "the strongest [unclear: per] sonal reasons for fighting in the party ranks," and he fights side by side with other Government employees as well as with many who are not yet [unclear: privileged] draw the public money for party service but are proving their right to do so.

To give specific instances of [unclear: what] nevertheless a patent and notorious [unclear: ev] would be a task equally unpleasant and unnecessary. Nobody who possess [unclear: a] deeper acquaintance with our [unclear: politi] than could be gleaned from the [unclear: Lond] papers would deny that for years [unclear: th] passport to Government favours [unclear: h] been the profession of Government politics, and that for years the profession has been habitually made by hundred who, on principle, were diametrically opposed to the Government, but [unclear: ce] formed for the sake of the good things that conformity alone would [unclear: bring] return of the number of temporary clerks in Government employ—clerks pointed in evasion of the Civil Service. Acts to the exclusion, as a rule, of those duly qualified by examination—would astonish the country, but without waiting for that, we can cite chapter and verse from the statute-book of the [unclear: cou] try to prove that the Government [unclear: ha] actually had to reinforce its wide power of maladministration in this respect by special enactments. When Mr. Seddon don took office, cadets could not be given a larger salary that £100 a year unless they had passed the Senior Civil Service Examination; but section [unclear: 3] the Civil Service Examination Act of 1900 extends the minimum to [unclear: £200] year, and substitutes for the standard examination "such examination as is prescribed by regulations to be made under this Act by the Governor-in-Council." page 9 In other words, Ministers have an absolutely free hand with these appointments up to £200 a year, and even above that amount they can prescribe such examination as they may think fit for their friends who have not brains enough to pass the Senior Civil Service Examination.

But it was by an unregarded and apparently formal clause in a Bill of last session that the Government most clearly showed its hand, and confessed the need of special legal ratification of appointments which had been made in disregard of the Law. The ostensible object of what is now section 15 of the Civil Service Classification Act, 1905, is to give the Governor power to make regulations for the employment of persons temporarily as experts; but an astounding proviso is added which declares that any persons employed in any department ai the time of the classification scheme coming into operation shall, if and when they have completed five years' continuous service, "be deemed ipso facto to be and to have been from the date of their last engagement members of the civil Service permanently appointed and subject in all respects to the laws relating to the service." By this monstrous enactment permanent validity was given, as we observed in our review of the Act, "to the appointment of every person of the right colour who has been jobbed into the service without passing the prescribed examinations"; and the result is secured by what is tantamount to a retrospective repeal of the Civil Service Acts in favour of Ministers and their friends. The Americans are laboriously emerging from the slough of corruption with the aid of a Civil Service Commission Act under "which an examination test applied by an independent board is steadily reducing the scope of political influence; and is it not equally plain that by a directly opposite process this colony is deliberately plunging itself more deeply in the mire?