Under the Constitution, Congress has charge of all navigable streams and harbors and it has spent billions in their improvement. Colonel Hepburn once made the statement on the floor of the House that the appropriations for the improvement of the channel of the Mississippi River between St. Louis and the Gulf were sufficient to have built a ship canal of boiler iron between these two points. No one ever questioned the correctness of the statement. A recent River and Harbor bill contained an appropriation to dredge the channel of a stream in Texas where the government’s engineers reported there was only one inch of water. Another brook in Arkansas with only six inches of water, got an appropriation. I assume that two more votes were necessary. I might add for the reader’s information that any stream in the United States can be made navigable in law by a joint resolution of the two Houses of Congress saying that it is navigable. Lawyers would call that navigable _de jure_ but many of them cannot be made navigable _de facto_ however much is expended in dredging and widening. CHAPTER XXIII CIVIL SERVICE The sole purpose of discussing the Civil Service System in this connection is to show what must ensue if the government continues its trend and enlarges its business operations. Partisan politics cannot be eliminated, neither does the Civil Service secure the most efficient. Concrete and actual instances are given as illustrations. So much has been said in favor of Civil Service by its friends, and so much criticism offered by those who know little about it, that I am impelled to submit a few observations drawn from five years’ experience at the head of a department having, a portion of the time, as high as twenty thousand people on its payroll, over ninety percent of whom were in the classified service. It is not my purpose to criticise or commend. I do intend, however, to make reasonably clear some of the inevitable conditions that would ensue if the government should remain operator or should become owner and operator of railroads, merchant ships, express, cable, telegraph and telephone companies, and other public utilities, constructor of airplanes, merchant ships, and logically producers of all materials and supplies therefor. Everyone concedes that to avoid complete partisan prostitution of these widely-extended and diversified interests, every agent, servant and employee, with the possible exception of unskilled laborers, would have to be covered under Civil Service. This would palliate the evil but, as we shall presently see, would not prevent political manipulation and influence, and would render efficient service absolutely impossible.