process must not be interfered with. It is not any too easy, at best, to get rid of a kindly-natured elderly incompetent, and if you add to the difficulty by law, he then stays permanently. Make the entrance to the service as far as possible non-partisan and make it at the lower grades, so that desirable positions shall come to those who have rendered good and faithful service in the lower grades, so that those entering the lower grades shall feel that if they do well they have a long and worthy career ahead of them. TO THE COMMITTEE AND ASSISTANT COMMITTEES ON DEPARTMENT METHODS, AT THE RESIDENCE OF MR. PINCHOT, WASHINGTON, MARCH 20, 1906 _Gentlemen_: I wish to express my very great appreciation of the work that you are doing. It would be a good thing for certain critics of our Government to realize the amount of hard, disinterested work for the Government represented by this gathering to which I am now speaking—a work which must in the immense majority of cases be its own reward, and therefore an ample reward; for there is nothing pleasanter than the consciousness of having done well a bit of work well worth doing. A year ago I appointed the Keep Commission, because I had become convinced that the business methods of our Government were by no means abreast of the times. While I think there is comparatively little corruption in the National Governmental service, and while that little I intend to cut out or have cut out through other agencies than yours, it yet remains true that there is a good deal of duplication of work, a good deal of clumsiness of work, and above all, the inevitable tendency toward mere bureaucratic methods against which every Government official should be perpetually on his guard—the tendency to regard not the case, but the papers in the case, as the all-important matter with which to deal, and to feel a proud sense of duty performed if all those papers are appropriately docketed and referred and minutes made about them, and then referred back, without regard to what has become of the real fact at issue.