The lack of efficiency in Federal administration which has been notorious for ninety years is due to the malign influence of manhood suffrage which renders it impossible to enforce standards of capacity. What Faguet calls “the religion of incompetency” is displayed even in the presidential appointments where men are moved about from office to office like checkers on a board, and put in places for which they have had no previous training whatever. This method of appointment is in itself convincing proof, not merely of the unfitness of the appointments, but of the vice of the whole system of selection. A jack of all trades is master of none. What would be said of the fitness of a man to superintend a watch-making establishment who had never worked at the trade or business of maker or of dealer in watches, and whose entire experience had consisted of one or two years in each of the employments of carpenter, dentist, cook and piano tuner? Yet the practice of politics sanctions just such appointments as that would be. Even for great offices requiring the highest skill, preparatory training or experience is rarely required. Looking back from 1918; out of forty-four United States Secretaries of State from the beginning of our history, thirty-three were lawyers; only three or four had any previous diplomatic experience; out of the sixteen last Secretaries of the Treasury, twelve were lawyers and only four bankers; out of the last thirteen Postmasters General, only one had ever before been in the Post Office Department; of forty-nine Secretaries of War in our history thirty-five were lawyers; the others were editors, bankers, etc., and only three or four had any previous military experience; out of thirty-eight Secretaries of the Navy twenty-seven were lawyers, three authors, and seven were business men. Not one of them all had any naval experience prior to taking control of the United States Navy. A former Secretary of the Navy gave the writer to understand that he had been appointed principally to distribute the patronage and to hold the state politically in line. Now, while it is quite true that a knowledge of the law and a training in the art of reading and understanding law is extremely important to any cabinet official, yet surely a lawyer cannot be expected to build ships, conduct a post-office business, direct the diplomacy of a great nation or carry on war properly without any appropriate previous training whatever. Yet under a system of government by manhood or universal suffrage untrained men are sure to get these high appointments because they are vote-getters and can obtain the support of the controllable class for the party in power; in short because they are machine men and the needs of the machine are first and imperative.