It should, however, be noted in this connection that in addition to the 31,825 clerks employed in the 2,252 offices of the first and second classes, there are 2,237 assistant postmasters. These were paid $2,536,997.24 for the year ended June 30th, 1910. There were in offices of the first and second-classes 2,252 postmasters. To these was paid the sum of $5,814,300. That makes the service personnel of the first and second class offices, not counting carriers, messengers, etc., 36,314, and gives a total of annual expenditures for this service amounting to $40,465,361.56. The reader will please keep in mind the fact that the foregoing figures apply only to postoffices of the first and second-classes. There may be a few clerks and also assistant postmasters in offices of the third-class. If so, there are so few of them that the department did not deem it worth while to account for them in that position in any of its fiscal statements, so far as I have been able to find. I would ask the reader also to bear in mind that while the following strictures are intended to apply to all three classes of Presidential postoffices, their application is less general and less forceful in offices of the second than in offices of the first class, and less in offices of the third-class than in either of the two higher class offices. There has been much talk by Postmaster Generals in recent years about efforts made and making to get the employes of the Postoffice Department into the classified service--getting them under civil service protection. Not only has this been made subject of urgent advocacy in almost every annual department report of recent years, but Postmaster Generals have made prolix and voluble reference to and favorable comment upon the progress that has been made in “taking the department out of politics.” Mr. Hitchcock in the 1909-10 report commends highly the progress made in that direction. See pages 13, 14, 24, 85, 86 and others of the report. The party stump and banquet oratory of the past twelve or more years has sparkled--fairly scintillated it might be said--with rhetorical coruscations about what “the administration has done” to remove the federal service from the “baleful clutch and influence of politics.”