The defects of the Civil Service Reform plan are obvious, and have been repeatedly pointed out. There are two principal ones; defects in material and weakness in organization. All experience shows that mere ability to answer questions is but slim proof of actual fitness for most employments. The minds of the successful candidates are apt to be storehouses of memory rather than factories of living ideas. The tendency of the examination system must be to emasculate the public service, to furnish it with half-hearted hirelings, destitute of initiative; routinists, who secure in their places and deprived of incentive to new achievement, gradually become mere wooden cogs in a lifeless machine. The head of such a force cannot be expected to accomplish much with men not chosen by him nor subject to his censure or removal. Such a civil service will be weak in time of prosperity, and may become intolerable in time of trouble and danger; an institution similar to the bureaucracies of continental Europe or to Charles Dickens’ “Circumlocution Office.” The late Andrew Carnegie, the great iron master, ascribed his success entirely to his tuck and wisdom in choosing his deputies. A political department is really a business organization, and to be efficient, it should have a competent head supported by a force of vigorous men of his own selection; chosen not by book examinations, but for practical capacity, all constantly guided and controlled by him, and inspired with the feeling of mutual responsibility for results. The vice of the Civil Service Reform system is that it entirely lacks the vigor and efficiency thus to be obtained. No better proof of the hopeless desperation of the American political reformers can be offered than their willingness even to consider the establishment of this bureaucratic system among us. Bryce approves it with the approval of despair: “Rather, they would say, interdict office holders from participation in politics; appoint them by competition, however absurd competition may sometimes appear, choose them by lot, like the Athenians and Florentines; only do not let offices be tenable at the pleasure of party chiefs and lie in the uncontrolled patronage of persons who can use them to strengthen their own political position.” (_American Commonwealth_, Vol. II, p. 609.) The present writer has been unable to think of anything worse to say of our present system of political appointments than this statement that it is worse than appointments by lot. Let it go at that.