Nowhere in private life is the principle of popular election applied to the choice of administrators or managers; such folly is confined to public affairs. The merchant service and the army and navy are not conducted upon the principle of universal suffrage; neither the crew nor the passengers, nor both united, are permitted to select the officers of a ship; nor are the rank and file permitted to vote for their officers in any navy, or in any well-disciplined army. The sick man does not choose his physician, nor the business man his lawyer or broker by taking the votes of his neighbors or friends. In all these instances, and in every similar case of necessary care in making a choice of an agent, the prerequisite which is insisted upon as first indispensable and controlling is efficiency; and such efficiency can only be obtained by intelligent selection. Administrative officials should always be possessed of character, experience, intelligence and other qualities which go to produce efficiency. Such possessions can only be recognized by those who are personally acquainted with the candidates and are competent to pass upon these qualities. Their selection should preferably be made by those who are to supervise their conduct in office, and to keep them up to the standard required. An appointing body is able to consider all the candidates who present themselves or whose friends present them; the electorate can only consider two or three to any advantage. The appointing body can examine personally all the candidates; the voters are incapable of properly examining any, and have neither the means nor the leisure for the careful scrutiny needed to estimate professional or expert qualifications. All administrative officers should therefore be placed in office by appointment of their superiors or supervisors who are to be held responsible for their conduct in office, and never by popular election at the polls. Of course, the politicians may reply, though they are not likely to do so, that the election of these state officers is a sham; that they are usually far from being the nondescripts whom the populace might choose if left unbossed; that they are really selected in secret long before election, by a political autocracy, which taking advantage of the ignorance and indifference of the mass of voters, sees to it that the powers and patronage of these offices go in the direction of selected favorites of the machine, not destitute of ability. This is at least partly true, for the tendency of manhood suffrage is to turn the elections into mere formal ratifications of the will of the bosses. And a machine appointment to an administrative office usually results much better for the public interest than a choice by manhood suffrage, especially where there are spoils in sight and where rival organizations sharpen their claws, as for instance in a mayoralty contest in a large city. Then ensues a real struggle, heightened by newspaper lies and