The extent to which some of these cabinet officers have been shifted about is astonishing. Mr. Cortelyou for instance had been stenographer and private secretary to President McKinley; and in a few years thereafter filled the offices of Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Postmaster General and Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Meyer was Postmaster General under Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy under Taft, the next President. Moody from the place of Secretary of the Navy under Roosevelt was suddenly jumped onto the bench and made Justice of the Supreme Court. Charles Bonaparte was Attorney General when he was shifted into the place of Secretary of the Navy. Now it is a sufficient tax on human credulity to ask one to believe that the original appointments of these men were made entirely because of fitness; but it exceeds the limit when we are required to suppose that while in the office of Postmaster General Mr. Cortelyou was really learning finance and becoming fitted for Secretary of the Treasury, while Mr. Meyer in the same Postmaster General’s office was becoming a great naval expert, a real seadog justified to be “Ruler of Uncle Sam’s Navee.”
It is notorious that all state appointments by the governor are made not for merit, but as a reward for political service, and invariably from the members of the political oligarchy who procured the governor’s election, or under their direction to members of their family or backers. The results are often grotesque. Look for a moment at a batch of state appointments; take the very first that happens to come to hand from New York. State Tax Commissioner W. was formerly State Comptroller and before that Postmaster. Election Superintendent R., formerly Assistant District Attorney in New York City, was before that in the Attorney General’s office in Albany and Superintendent of State Prisons. R. 2 was recently Collector of the Port of Rochester; he now holds a state office. Another couple:--V. has been successively Commissioner of Excise, Commissioner of Police, Commissioner of Docks, Police Justice, Commissioner of Elections; Superintendent of Public Buildings; Superintendent of Elections. H. has held the offices of Deputy Collector of Internal Revenue; member of Board of Alderman; Grain Superintendent; Sealer of Weights and Measures; Superintendent of Streets and Clerk of the Court. The practice is the same in all states and cities, and these five instances could be easily increased to five thousand and with time and research to five hundred thousand. In fact it is rare to find a man of over thirty-five years of age in public office who has not filled several entirely different political employments. It is said that one of the members of the New York Constitutional Convention of 1846 proposed that public officials should be selected by lot; and it is doubtful whether in some cases the result would not be an improvement on the present system. Is it any wonder that government administration is a joke, an object of scorn to business men? Efficiency cannot be expected in any department of government or business whose chief is ignorant of the details of its operations. And yet so demoralizing has been the effect of the manhood suffrage political tradition, so accustomed are not merely the politicians but the public to the vicious practice of distributing these most important offices as rewards for political work, that the proposal to require them to be filled by men of experience and training in the work of their respective offices would probably be met with derisive laughter in every governmental department.