‘A non-competitive examination means that every one of the many thousands who will pass the examinations will have an equal right to appointment, and that personal and political pressure must in the end, as always before, become the determining factor with regard to the great body of these temporary employments. I cannot too earnestly urge that the Director of the Census be relieved from this unfortunate situation.’ "To provide that the clerks and other employés shall be appointed after non-competitive examination, and yet to provide that they shall be selected without regard to political party affiliations, means merely that the appointments shall be treated as the perquisites of the politicians of both parties, instead of as the perquisites of the politicians of one party. I do not believe in the doctrine that to the victor belongs the spoils; but I think even less of the doctrine that the spoils shall be divided without a fight by the professional politicians on both sides; and this would be the result of permitting the bill in its present shape to become a law. Both of the last censuses, the eleventh and the twelfth, were taken under a provision of law excluding competition; that is, necessitating the appointments being made under the spoils system. Every man competent to speak with authority because of his knowledge of and familiarity with the work of those censuses has stated that the result was to produce extravagance and demoralization." The veto went to Congress on the 5th of February, 1909, one month before the expiration of President Roosevelt’s term of office. His successor-to-be was well known to be in sympathy with his views of the public service, and no attempt was made either to pass the bill over the veto, or to proffer its spoils-seeking provisions to the new occupant of the Presidency when he came in. Congress was compelled, in this case, as in many before, to surrender its cherished spoils of salaried public employment to civil service reform, simply because public interests and public sentiment are better represented, as a rule, in the White House than in the Capitol, which is not a pleasing fact.