Jasper County Democrat, Volume 8, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 October 1905 — WASHINGTON LETTER. [ARTICLE]

WASHINGTON LETTER.

Political and General Gossip of the National Capital. Special Correspondence to The Democrat: The United States Government differs from the Governments of other great powers in that its civil service far exceeds in personnel its military or naval service. This cannot be said of Germany, of France, Russia or any other great power. With them there

are far more soldiers bearing arms than clerks wedding pens, and the United States Government is further peculiar in its extensive employment of women in clerical work. Perhaps in no other country except Russia is the Civil Service establishment so much in need of reorganization and reform. A great reform was doubtless effected when admission to the service was made dependent on a competitive examination requiring certain educational attainments. The service under Roosevelt is decidedly better than it was under Grant. But the fact that a man or woman has proved by an examination that he can spell, write and knows something of arithmetic does not prove that he is willing to work or will not take advantage of the many opportunities to neglect and shirk his work. The departments are encumbered with employees who have been placed there on account of their political services or on account of their relationship to Senators or Senators wives or mothers in-law. They have held fast through many administrations successive, Cabinet officers as heads of Departments hesitating to displace clerks so respectable, so venerable and of such formidable antecedents. These clerks so well entrenched have a most demoralizing influence. They have long drawn pay doing little or no work, and are adepts in all the arts of shirking work and making the most of their sinecure. The President and the Cabinet Officers have long been cogizant of this state of affairs and at a Cabinet meeting just previous to the President's departure for the South it was decided that the President and Cabinet officers should be entitled to the right to dismiss peremtorily any civil service employee known to be inefficient, or obstructive to the Government service. In such a case the dismissal should be final and the discharged employee without recourse or right of appeal. The howl that has arisen in the Departments in Washington demonstrates better than anything else could the number of heads that should fall. The efficient, honest and industrious clerk has nothing to fear from the drder yet it is conservative to estimate that thirty per cent of the Government clerks are shaking in their shoes at the present moment. It is not

to be supposed that thirty per oent of the civil employees will be dismissed nor that a third of even that proportion will go, but every man and woman with a guilty conscience is conscious that he or she is in range of the lightning that may strike at any moment.

t t t The Government clerk does not have a hard time. He is asked to work seven and half hours six days in the week. He has thirty days annual sick leave and thirty days annual vacation. He has as many holidays as a patriotic people can devise reasons for or find dead heroes to honor, including Labor Day. During three months of the summer he is dismissed every Saturday at noon. And for all of this be gets a salary higher than would be paid by any private corporation and paid with a regularity that nothing can interrupt. And does he in exchange always give efficient and honest service? Not by any means. The majority actually steal from the Government in time, service and supplies more than they are worth to it, and the manner and diversity of their evasions and speculations would take a book to describe. In the small incident of receiving visitors during office hours it is impossible to compute how much of their time the Government loses. Some clerks are permitted to receive visitors until two o’clock of each day and it is no uncommon sight to find the toilet room for the women clerks filled with the clerks and their guests until that hour. Every bureau has a messenger who is there for the better communication of the different bureaus. It is no uncommon thing for him to act on occasions as the janitor, butler or coachman of the bureau chief whom he is afraid to offend for fear of losing his place. Hundreds of clerks are engaged in literary work which they do in office hours with the aid of Government paid amanuenses, employing data collected by the Government, using department stationery and typewriters. The number who take department stationery, ink, penknives as private property to their homes is so great as to be the rule rather than the exception. In the matter of vacations their subterfuges for obtaining more than they are entitled to would give lessons to diplomats. If a clerk divides his thirty days and takes one at a time he may by careful management get sixty in the year, that is by lopping a half day from the day he leaves and a half day from the day he returns he gets an extra day with full pay. For sick leave he can always obtain a physician’s certificate that he has been ill enough to need a picnic.

These are the smallest of the offenses of the clerks and so common as to be considered outside' altogether the question of a clerks honesty or efficiency. The greater ones that may possibly come up for rectification under the new law are too numerous and to widely a varying character to make description possible. Suffice an example or two. A chief of a bureau is an habitual drunkard. He has a trusted clerk who feels his own position more secure or his chances for promotion better if he humors the chief. The ■Jhief leaves with him his signature attached to blank document papers of all variety when he goes for a spree. The clerk tills them in and they go to the Secretary and occasionally even the President is honored with one which the chief has never seen except when he attached his name to the blank. His clerk keeps him informed in a general way of the office, if he can be found and if his absence causes to much comment he generally has sufficient control to sober up and come back until quiet is restored. Another, the correspondent of a powerful newspaper, wants his “lady friend” kept in office It is both more respectable and more economical for him. She hasn’t had the advantages of an extensive education but she can dust books so she gets a place at seventy-five per month. She isn’t always clean or always polite or always sober but it is a dangerous thing to antagonize a powerful newspaper and the. correspondent probably knows about other irregularities in the Department that the chief who signs each month for her efficiency and good conduct would not have made public for a good deal more than seventy-five dollars a month paid by the Government. But space forbids enumeration. The Cabinet Officers have the right in their own hands now. If they allow the Government to be so persistently and systematically fleeced the public will know where to place the responsibility.

An armload of old papers for a nickel at The Democrat office.