While the foregoing argument has been directed chiefly to the case of candidates for elective office it is also applicable in some particulars to the campaign contributions of officials under civil service rules. Usually efforts are made with a considerable degree of success to protect the latter from the assessment system. The old abuse of extortion by officials of higher rank is in a fair way to be obliterated, although sporadic cases of this sort still occur even in the federal service. Unfortunately it is easy to appoint collectors who themselves hold no office under civil service rules, but whose intimate personal relations with high officials are widely known to subordinates. Civil service employees of higher grades are probably too well informed of their rights to submit to extortion veiled in this or any other guise, but there are doubtless considerable numbers of the less intelligent and poorly paid civil servants, at least in some of our state and local governments, who are really being assessed frequently and heavily under the pretence, of course, of “voluntary” contributions. Probably it is true everywhere that those who suffer worst from this despicable malpractice are precisely those who are least able to bear it. Even this, however, is not the chief evil of the system. Absolute non-partisanship in their official work can hardly be expected of a body of men who are constantly being approached for campaign contributions, and in effect being reminded thereby that, civil service or no civil service, they are deemed to be subject in a peculiar degree to party taxation. Moreover one of the great weaknesses of the civil service establishment is the conviction on the part of the opposition party, inevitable whether or not it be justifiable, that civil service employees are being exploited for contributions by the party in power. Publicity may dispel both this abuse, so far as it exists, and also the misconceptions based upon it. If not it may prove desirable in the future to prohibit absolutely all campaign contributions from employees under civil service rules. Administration will certainly be much easier and suspicion more difficult when no contribution whatever is legally permissible than under any system which permits “voluntary” offerings.