BEYON

A New Era in our History. EYOND question the feature of the national administration since the 4th of March, 1885, which has engaged the largest share of public attention has been its attitude toward the civil service. This very significant fact marks the opening of a new era in our history, an era in which, for the first time, the proper conduct of the government, Federal, State, and municipal, assumes the first rank among political questions.

The United States as a nation started with a Constitution which challenges the fresh admiration of each new generation of Americans, and with methods of administration well suited to the small population of a thinly settled region on the eastern slope of the continent. In local affairs as a rule the town-meeting excellently served all the purposes of the community at a time when there were only about half a dozen cities, and the present metropolis itself, then barely ahead of Philadelphia, had but thirty-three thousand people. The young Republic had scarcely reached its majority before there came another war with England, and the "era of good feeling" which succeeded was soon disturbed by the first Nullification mutterings of the rising storm over the extension of the slave power. There were brief periods, as notably upon the introduction by Andrew Jackson of the spoils system in 1829, when statesmen found time and secured attention for the consideration of vital questions concerning governmental methods; but all the while, and more and more with the passage of the years, much as they tried to conceal it from themselves, people were chiefly concerned with the more fundamental question as to whether the Union itself were to endure. At last came the four years' struggle to determine whether the Government should survive. That ended, there ensued a long and most engrossing controversy to decide how "the fruits of the war" could most surely be garnered, and how the relations of the reconstructed States to the reconstituted Union should permanently be adjusted.

Meanwhile the nation had been growing from less than four millions of people to more than fifty; cities of great size had sprung up in what a century before had been a wilderness; nearly a quarter of the population had drifted into the cities and large towns; the office-holders of the Federal government alone had become an army more than one hundred thousand strong; old methods had been outgrown and become antiquated; new questions of administration, previously undreamed of, had arisen in national, state, and municipal affairs alike. The salvation of the Republic from the danger threatened by secession was no sooner assured than far-sighted men pointed out a fresh peril to its perpetuity. The war, which so largely widened the scope of government operations and increased the number of office-holders, greatly aggravated the evils which men like Webster, Clay, and Calhoun had predicted as certain to come when that most immoral of dogmas, "To the victor belong the spoils," was

adopted by both political parties as an article of faith. The late Thomas A. Jenckes, who unhappily died in 1875, a dozen years too soon to witness the triumph of his principles, must always be remembered for having possessed the insight to detect the danger, the wisdom to perceive the cure, and the persistence to extort attention from a reluctant Congress in the troublous years of the Andrew Johnson administration. Looking back to that stormy period and recalling the grave character of the reconstruction disputes, which culminated in the impeachment of the President, the country can better appreciate the force of the man, who, coming from the smallest State of the Union, secured a hearing for civil-service reform in 1866.

But it was scarcely more than a hearing that even Mr. Jenckes could secure, and he could not long keep the public ear. The slave had been freed; he was soon after enfranchised; but "the negro question" still remained the engrossing one. The attitude of the Federal government toward the States which had attempted secession was a subject of constant discussion for years after their Senators and Representatives again sat in Congress, and the frequent recourse to the use of Federal troops for the settlement of disputes in State capitals made the condition of the South the overshadowing subject of national attention. An experiment in the direction of carrying out the ideas of which Mr. Jenckes had been the apostle was made during Grant's administration, but although it received the hearty support of many thoughtful men, it never gained a strong hold upon the general public. There was always something else which the politicians insisted, and made the people believe, was the main issue. When Congress killed the experiment in 1874 by refusing the modest sum required to keep it going, only a small element felt any indignation, or, indeed, had any pronounced feeling on the subject either way.

Mr. Hayes rightly declared, in his letter accepting the Republican nomination for the Presidency in 1876, that the plank regarding civil-service reform in the party platform was "of paramount importance," and during his Administration the subject secured more general attention than ever before. But two great events were needed to make the proper conduct of the Government the most prominent question of the day. One was a proof, so startling as to impress the dullest mind, of the danger to the Republic which lurked in the spoils system. This was furnished by the assassination of Garfield at the hand of a disappointed office-seeker. The other event was a change in the control of the Government without the dreaded ruin to national interests and prosperity.

In 1881 the nation was made to feel the necessity of reform; in 1887 it sees that it can give its well-nigh undivided attention to the consideration of reform, and it is evidently going to do so, not merely so far as Federal offices are concerned, but State and municipal offices and administration as well.

Reform in Municipal Government.

THE passage by Congress early in 1883 of the Pendleton bill, applying the competitive principle to the minor places in the Washington Departments and in the chief custom-houses and post-offices of the country, was the corner-stone of a system which it is already certain will ultimately be developed throughout the Federal government. The contemptible failure of the feeble attempts in the Forty-ninth Congress to repeal the Pendleton law and to starve out the civil-service commission show that the reform "has come to stay." The public is far ahead of Congress in this matter. The changed tone of those newspapers which have always ridiculed the new system shows that they recognize their defeat. Experience has spoiled all their old arguments. There was the "college graduate" bogy, for instance. If we were to have examinations for admission to the service, it was declared “only college graduates would stand any show," and the young man who had never been beyond the common school "would be nowhere." Statistics showing that more than four-fifths of the successful contestants were men who had received only a common-school education have effectually disposed of this ad captandum plea, and the other clap-trap appeals to prejudice have fared no better. The old-time champions of the spoils system in the Federal government virtually confess their defeat, and the success of the competitive system in the State governments and chief cities of New York and Massachusetts assures its ultimate adoption by other States and municipalities.

Another reform no less important is now to be achieved. What is commonly called civil-service reform, so far as it has hitherto been carried in Federal, State and city governments, is chiefly a system for procuring good clerks, whose competency has been established by a competitive test. This is a matter of great importance, because it is fundamental. With the entrance to the service properly arranged, it is only a question of time when the whole service will be conducted upon sound principles. But this is only one phase of the great undertaking involved in a thoroughgoing reform of governmental methods. In a popular government the health of the body politic depends upon pure elections. The theory of the fathers was that when an office, like that of congressman, was to be filled, the people of a district would look about to see who was the fittest man to represent them, and elect him with out the necessity of his doing anything in the matter. Cases are still known where the theory is carried into practice. A dozen years ago certain citizens of a Western Massachusetts district, disgusted with the ring which dictated the course of the dominant party, nominated President Seelye of Amherst College as an independent candidate for Congress, and elected him. His only connection with the canvass was to write a letter in reply to the notification of his nomination, consenting to be voted for. It was in the days when postage stamps were a cent higher than now, and Mr. Seelye used to say that his campaign expenses were only three cents the cost of the stamp which he placed upon his letter of acceptance.

In New York City now, it costs a man from $5000 to $10,000 to run for Congress. In other words, he must pay out beforehand the salary for one, if not both, of

the years of the term. If he aspires to a position on the bench, he must expend in advance of the election $10,000 or $15,000 for one of the lower courts; perhaps $20,000 for a place in the Supreme Court. If he is ambitious to become mayor, he must be willing to contribute as large a sum as $24,000. These are only samples of the astonishing facts as to "assessments" which Mr. William M. Ivins, who has enjoyed exceptional opportunities for learning the truth, made public in his speech to the Commonwealth Club not long ago. Mr. Ivins showed exactly how the system works; how the "machines" which have been built up control on election day a well-disciplined force of 45,000 men, or one-fifth of the entire voting population, all of whom are under pay and have a pecuniary interest in the result. Mr. Joseph B. Bishop, in a speech at the succeeding meeting of the same club, presented the remedies, which he found in removing the necessity for assessments, by having the ballots printed and distributed by the city and at the city's expense, thus doing away with the army of machine workers at the polls; in limiting by law the expenditures of candidates; and in enacting a statute similar to the English "Corrupt Practices Act," forbidding bribery and undue influences of all kinds and fixing penalties.

The speeches of Mr. Ivins and Mr. Bishop, which were printed in full, attracted the notice not merely of the New York public, but of intelligent people throughout the country. The press of other cities appreciated that they must anticipate, where they have not already begun to suffer, the same evils unless a halt were called in New York; the rural press realized that the country cannot escape the introduction of similar abuses if they are allowed to remain permanently in the cities.

College Expenses.

THE Commencement season brings its usual supply of newspaper articles on the inordinate expense of education in our modern colleges. In this case, as in so many others, the supply of articles meets a general demand. It is not easy for a father to foot enormous bills for his son at college with any patience, when he remembers the narrow fund which carried him through college, or for want of which he was compelled to give up the idea of going to college altogether. The newspaper article not only states his feeling in vigorous English, but gives him a tangible foundation for his feeling. It meets his case, and the case of countless others, too exactly not to find favor in their eyes. And so the newspapers brim with notes of the "average cost" of going through this college and that, and with reflections on the extravagance which is encouraged by the methods of the modern college life. There are, however, certain correctives which should go with the annual statistics.

An average may be mathematically true, and yet altogether delusive. "I make a statement that the average age of my friends is 20 years. If my friends are 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22 years of age, the average 20 is a useful and true expression. If, however, they are 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30, it is less useful; and if they are 4 of them 10 years old and I of them 60, the average 20 is still numerically correct, but it is absurd and untruthful in the impression it gives." The last case is quite parallel with the "averages" of the expenses of

classes at the various American colleges, as they are annually published in the newspapers. The few extravagant students are able to do so much more effective work at their end than the great body of the students can do at theirs, that the "average" goes up to a figure which is quite misleading. Meantime, in the teeth of all the averages, the great body of the students go on as their fathers did, and, even at those colleges which are selected as the most expensive of all, there is always a smaller body of students who are working their way through college and showing that the "average" has no real relation to the question. There is not a college in America from which poverty alone need debar a student; there is not one from which he may not graduate, provided he has that amount of ability which will make a college education a benefit, and provided, also, he is willing to work before and through his course, and deny himself, as was the custom in our fathers' days.

It is this last custom which is going out of existence; and that is enough to show that the root of the evil does not lie in the college, but in the home. The very parents who speak so bitterly of the encouragement given to young men's extravagance by the modern college life have carefully trained their sons for just the life which they have found. Usually men in moderate circumstances, they have never compelled their sons to earn a dollar in their lives, or to know the cost or value of money, or to deny themselves anything within their reach, or to do anything except spend money when a favorable opportunity offered. The sons, passing for the first time beyond the father's eye, and able to plead circumstances which parents cannot deny from personal knowledge, are in a fair position to deplete the paternal pocket-book, and have never been trained to refrain from improving such an opportunity. It is not for his own selfish gratification that the son joins this or that college society, or takes all the college papers, or "goes with the nine" to watch an intercollegiate game in another college town, or does any of the other things for which his father has to pay,—not at all; it is only because he would be ostracized in college if he refrained from such indulgences. Such are the statements which accompany the periodical petitions for checks; and the father, finding it easier to curse college extravagance than to take the trouble of ascertaining the true state of the case, continues his mistraining of the boy by paying his bills until, at the end of the college course, the son is turned loose upon the world, to find at last what a dollar really

means.

In nine cases out of ten, the student's self-control, if it led to a refusal to be enticed into unnecessary expenditures, would be simply ignored by the other students of his college. There are always cliques which would ignore himself as well; and, to this extent, the dreaded "taboo" might be endured. But this difficulty is purely subjective; it is in the student himself, and its roots are in his home-training. If he has come to college to cultivate or value the society of such cliques, the penalty has an effective force; if he has been trained to undervalue or ignore the penalty, it has no power over him. When he yields to it and writes home that he "must have" money for this, that, or the other purpose, the father who supplies this demand is cultivating further the son's vanity, and

further preparing vexation of spirit for himself. For him to pay the money and thus increase the evil, while he considers it the unperformed duty of the college authorities to suppress all the societies, expel the editors of all the college papers, and abolish the intercollegiate games, is merely another example of the decadence of American home-life and discipline. The father expects the college to do for the son what the home no longer does for him; he sends the college flabby material, and expects the material to be turned into such strong, self-poised, self-controlled manhood as the American home once furnished to the college. If the children's teeth are set on edge, it is largely because the fathers have eaten sour grapes.

There can be little doubt that two-thirds of the material now sent to college would be bettered by being put into a workshop of some kind for two years between the ages of twelve and sixteen. The spread of comfort among the people has been steadily increasing the number of those who can spare their sons the necessity of work even through their years of early manhood; and we have not yet come to understand the full measure of the injury which is thus done to the character of the boy. At the same time, the colleges have been developing in a direction which gives greater and still greater freedom to the student, and thus brings into constantly greater prominence the evils resulting from the modern American system of home-training. To check the college in its natural course of development, to demand that it shall cease its proper work and attend to wrapping the student in cotton-wool and keeping him from the temptations incident to every really manly life, would be merely to make permanent and irreparable the damage which is being done to young American manhood. Things must be worse before they can be better. American parents must learn that education is not an affair of books alone; that it is not complete when so many books have been finished and so many term-bills paid; that a true education consists even more largely in the training of the character and of the will than in book-knowledge. When American homes send to American colleges boys who have been trained to discriminate between the accidents of life and its essentials, the complaints of college extravagance will disappear, and a good many other evils will go with them.

The Metropolitan Spirit.

THE current year has been remarkable for its conspicuous proofs that matters æsthetic and scholarly are taking a wider and deeper hold upon the people of the leading American city. New York is becoming metropolitan not merely in intention, but in fact. The metropolitan spirit is abroad in society, and the year 1887 will be memorable for the long step then taken in advancing our gigantic community in the right direction. The city has never been behind in religious and charitable exertion; of late years its politics have been not a little improved, and the work of purification was never more active than now, nor ever was urged more strongly and directly toward fundamental reforms. But the artistic revival of a dozen or fifteen years ago has had a sudden fruition within the last year or two that goes along with a revival in all

go. They knew, moreover, that the kind of food furnished in such boarding-houses as they must patronize was in many cases inferior and unwholesome. Under such conditions it is not strange that the working-girls of the cities often develop abnormal appetites, and vicious tastes, and rude manners; the wonder is that so many of them keep their health unbroken and their characters unsullied. And these men of good-will, studying with what seems to be a sincere philanthropy the welfare of the thousand women by whose labor they are accumulating their fortune, determined to build for them, if not a " Palace of Delight," at least a Hall of Comfort, in which shelter and care and companionship and opportunities of wholesome diversion and of mental cultivation should be freely furnished them.

This "Seaside Institute" will cost the builders about forty thousand dollars. It is a shapely building externally - no mere barracks, but a well-proportioned and winning structure, seventy-five feet square and three stories in height, proclaiming in its very form the presence of other than "economical" motives. In the basement is a large refectory, with kitchen attached, in which the best of plain food will be furnished at cost. Those who wish will be permitted to order by the card; a glass of milk for a cent, or a cup of coffee at the same price, indicate the scale of the charges. An experienced and popular caterer tells me that the actual cost of the food is not more than this — that the project is feasible from this point of view. Those girls who wish may obtain regular board at this refectory, at prices not to exceed two dollars and a half a week. It is hoped that the charge may be less than this. "The food will be prepared," say the proprietors, "by experienced cooks, and served in the best manner. The value of this provision for the comfort and health of the girls can be estimated only by those who have tested the cooking of the average cheap boardinghouse. To be permitted to sit down in a bright and airy room, at a clean and prettily furnished table, to a well-cooked meal, will seem to many of these young women a foretaste of Paradise. In the determination to make this part of their plan serviceable to their employees, the proprietors will not haggle about the cost. If the refectory should not quite pay expenses, the bill of fare will not be cheapened, but the deficiency will be provided for.

The floor above is entered from the street by a wide porch which opens into a generous hall, on the left of which is a reception and conversation room, connecting by sliding doors with a music-room in the rear. Back of this is an ample lavatory with numerous bath-rooms- -a most sumptuous provision for the comfort of the girls, and one which they are sure to appreciate. On the right of the hall is the great reading

room

or common-room, a spacious and beautiful apartment, and in the rear of this, and communicating with it, the library, surrounded by low cases whose shelves will be filled with books for the use of the girls. Here, too, will be found numerous writingtables and full supplies of writing-materials.

An easy stairway leads to the second floor. The first apartment on the right of the hall is a room to be furnished with sewing-machines, where the girls will be able to do their own sewing. Farther on are two or three class-rooms, in which evening classes will be taught in any branches which the young women may VOL. XXXIV.-65.

desire to study. The plan is to permit them to organize these classes for themselves, in any branch in which they may desire instruction,― singing, penmanship, book-keeping, type-writing, stenography, fancy needlework, or whatever they wish; for all classes so organized, containing a certain number, teachers will be provided. The other side of this story is occupied by a large assembly-room, seating five or six hundred, with stage and anterooms, in which lectures, concerts, and entertainments of all kinds may be given to the inmates. It is hoped that they will take Mr. Besant's hint with respect to the use of this room, and learn how to furnish with these facilities a large part of their own diversion.

Several pianos will be located in different parts of the building, on which students of music will be permitted to practice. A competent matron will be put in charge of the Institute, to whose wisdom the general management will be largely intrusted. The whole building is warmed by steam and lighted by electricity.

The design is to furnish an attractive and delightful home for these young women during all the hours when they are not at work or asleep. The question about lodgings has been considered by the Messrs. Warner, but they have not been satisfied of the wisdom of furnishing these. It is possible that they may yet need lodging-houses in the neighborhood of the Seaside Institute; but at present they are not convinced that it may not be better for their women to keep their rooms in private families. The proprietors have found by in vestigation that half of their employees live within half a mile of the factory, so that the Institute will be easily accessible to most of them. Several rooms in the third story will be furnished as lodgings into which any of the women who are ill, or temporarily without homes, may be received, under the matron's care.

"All of the benefits afforded by the establishment," say the proprietors, "will be substantially free, except food, which will be furnished at or below cost. All the women who are in the employ of Warner Brothers will be entitled to any of the educational, literary, musical, and social privileges that may be furnished." There has been a question whether a small fee, say one dollar a year, might not secure a more general and freer use of the privileges of the Institute; whether the girls would not more readily avail themselves of a provision which was not entirely gratuitous. If any such charge should be made, it would be nominal, and only for the purpose of extending the benefits of the Institute.

Another feature of the institution is thus described by one of the proprietors: "We shall have connected with the building a savings bank, in order to encourage our hands to save some portion of their earnings. I have long since learned that what one earns has little to do with what he saves. One with an income of ten thousand dollars is no more likely to lay aside a portion of his earnings than one with an income of one thousand. The principle of saving is either inherited, or it must be cultivated, and it is to encourage this principle that this branch of the institution will be established. This privilege will be extended to all our help, male and female." Every employee who deposits two dollars a month is also promised that a half-dollar will be added to the deposit by the employers; and interest will be paid on all deposits, besides the bonus allowed.

It is evident that a considerable amount will be re