The greatness of the advance of civil service reform in the United States, within the quarter century since its beginning, is one of the most hopefully inspiring facts in recent American history. But, by the side of it stands the warning and shaming fact, that it has been achieved, from first to last, by forces outside of Congress, and outside of all other legislative bodies which supposedly represent the political will of the people. Every measure of legislation that has promoted it has been wrung from unwilling majorities in those bodies,—yielded only when they feared to refuse. That Congress, in both Houses, would wreck with eagerness, to-day, if it dared, the bettered public service of the nation, to recover for its members and their party henchmen the old "spoils" of office and place, was shown unmistakably, within the last year of this record, by its action on the bill to provide for the taking of the Census of 1910. {108} The President, and every responsible official connected with the Census Bureau, had borne testimony to the inefficiency and wasteful costliness of previous census-taking under the old system of appointment, and had besought Congress to provide in the bill for an effective test of qualification for the employment by competitive examination. Considerable majorities in both House and Senate turned an equally deaf ear to all considerations of public interest in the matter, and passed a bill which enabled Senators and Representatives to parcel out between themselves the large number of appointments to be made. President Roosevelt did not hesitate to veto the bill, and gave it a thorough dissection in the Message which explained his disapproval. In part, his comments on the Act offered to him were as follows: "Section 7 of the act provides in effect that appointments to the census shall be under the spoils system, for this is the real meaning of the provision that they shall be subject only to non-competitive examination. The proviso is added that they shall be selected without regard to political party affiliations. But there is only one way to guarantee that they shall be selected without regard to politics and on merit, and that is by choosing them after competitive examination from the lists of eligibles provided by the Civil Service Commission. The present Director of the Census in his last report states the exact fact about these non-competitive examinations when he says: