The Sun.
London, England, 1868-06-18 00:00:00

THE CIVIL SERVICE BILL.

Our readers are aware of the deep interest we
take in this subject, which we regard as one of the
greatest importance to the United States. It is
simply impossible to attempt any reformation in the
political corruption so strongly condemned by the
Chicago Convention before the Civil Service of the
country has been wholly remodelled. What folly
it is to put the greatest temptations in the way of the
needy, and then to bewail the prevalence of theft.
Mr. Jenckes's Bill has been frequently alluded to by
us, and we cannot do better than to reproduce the
article which appeared in the New York Nation,
May 28, on the subject..
Taking advantage of the comparative lull in the
ordinary business of legislation, Mr. Jenekes, on
Thursday week, May 14, introduced his bill to re-
gulate the Civil Service of the United States. He
reported it from the Joint Select Committee on
Retrenchment, and he supported it by a speech
which was reported in the telegraphic summary as
having occupied an hour, but not nne word of its
contents or of the scheme of the bill was given.
The plan is substantially that of Mr. Jenckes's ori-
ginal bill on this subject. It creates a department
of the Civil Service, to be presided over by the
Vice-President, with a board of four commissioners,
to be appointed for five years. Their duties are,
first, to prescribe the qualifications requisite for an
appointment into each branch and grade of the Civil
Service; next, to provide for the examinations, and
periods, and conditions of probation of all persons
eligible and presenting themselves for admission into
the Civil Service ; third, to establish rules for appli-
cations, examinations, and appointments ; and,
finally, to examine personally, or by persons by
them specially designated, the applicants for ap-
pointment into the Civil Service of the United
States. The Act then goes on to provide for the
order and manner in which appointments to the
Civil Service shall be made from those who have
passed the prescribed examination and probation.
The proposed law is clear and simple, short and
to the purpose, free from preambles and provisos,
and it is so plain that he who rues for office must
hereafter read it and understand it. The army of
office holders now in place, and of their prospective
successors, must look upon it as their shibboleth,
and learn from it how to live and die in office. Of
the greatness of the task which he has undertaken
Mr. Jenckes shows a thorough comprehension. He
proposes utterly to destroy the great American
curse of party patronage. He says, on the eve of a
Presidential election, that it is for the interest of
the country to pass a law which will forbid the re-
moval of fifty thousand officials as the result of a
change in the political complexion of the Govern-
ment. Not content with a theoretical discussion
of the merits of a permanent civil service, Mr.
Jenckes tells us that he has taken the testimony of
the greater number of the chief officers in the ex-
isting civil service, and he gives us the result. The
Committee on Retrenchment have received reports
from 446 officers confirmed by the Senate, in all
branches of the civil service, whose subordinates
within the operation of this Act number 12,819,
and of these officers 362, having 11,561 subordi-
nates, express themselves decidedly in favour of the
proposed reform. Of the residue 12 officers, having
143 subordinates, express a decided opposition to
it, and the remainder either do not answer the
vital questions at all, or answer them evasively.
With such facts, plainly and tersely put, as they
are in this speech of Mr. Jenckes, it is easier to
find forcible arguments in support of the measure
than to educe them from our general and theoreti-
cal belief in its efficiency. What are the substan-
tial rewards which Mr. Jenckes promises for the
fruits of his bill if it be made law? Double the
amount of the present service at two-thirds of the
present cost ;
a saving in the expense of the collec-
tion of the revenues of one-half the fifteen millions
which it now takes ; and, finally, an addition of
revenue from the subjects of taxation proposed to
be retained by the Committee of Ways and Means
of fifty millions in the internal revenue and twenty-
five millions in the customs. In short, the country
will be richer by a hundred millions every year if
it adopt a law which will do more to elevate the
politics of the country from the great Serbonian bog
in which it is now bedraggled and bemired, more to
make statesmen of our politicians, financiers and
economists of our revenue officials, more to save
the people from corruption, more to preserve the
Government from mischief, more to renew, and re•
store, and sustain the virtues of the Republic than
all the legislation of the last decade.

With a Constitution purified from slavery, with
a Government under it that has undergone the
throes of civil war, of dissensions between its co-
ordinate branches, and with a people honestly and
heartily in earnest to maintain both the Government
and the Constitution, there is still a vice in the
administration of the laws which almost palsies
them. This mischief lies in the shifting, changing,
uncertain, and gradually decaying condition of our
civil service. Up to the breaking out of the re-
bellion it mattered little how the officers of the
United States exercised their functions, for the
Government was seen rather than felt, it was an
idea rather than a fact. All this changed with the
rebellion, with the enormous efforts of the Govern-
ment to maintain itself, with the burdens put on
the people by the success of these efforts, and with
the taxes and the vast Addition of revenue and out-
lay that were then voluntarily assumed. The task
of adjusting these burdens to our capacity, to make
sources of national income without destroying
national wealth, has tested the fitness of our
political system to do this work. In any other
country than our own, with its youth, its wealth,
its vigour, its unlimited expanse of territory, its
growing tide of emigration, the Government would
have broken down. That it will not do so now
may call forth all our gratitude. That it may be
strengthened and fittt.d for the work that it has yet
to do, in developing the power and capacity of the
country in industrial and in other directions, there
must be a rslortn in that one thing which has
hitherto been the pitfall of every political party,
and the blighting curse of till young men who be-
longed to one or other of the great armies of our
Government by parties. This reform is, as we be-
lieve, effected by Mr. Jcnckes's bill—at least it is
aimed at; and as tentative legislation has been the
best thing that we could get i❑ other matters, so it
may be the best, or in the end it may secure us that
which is best, in our civil service.
As we have remarked elsewhere, every party and
every politician is ready enough to denounce cor-
ruption in the abstract. Nobody will ever have the
hardihood to get up and defend the appointment of
dishonest men to public offices, or the practice of
cheating the Government. There will never be

party avowedly and notoriously held tOg:::.ther—bj
" the cohesive power of public plunder," and which
it will be sufficient to turn out of office in order
to secure purity and efficiency. Therefore,
when a party passes resolutions against cor-
ruption in general, as the Republican party
has just been doing, it merely fires blank
cartridge. It makes a fine, exhilarating noise, but
it does not hurt or frighten the knaves. Under
the present system no party can be honest, because
no party can change human nature. Therefore,
the public ought not to be, and we trust will not
be, content any longer with vague denunciations
of fraud. It ought to demand practical measures
of reform, set down in black and white. It ought
not any longer to put up with windy abuse of
Andrew Johnson or of the Copperheads. In this
kind of work no knave ever is, or ever will be,
found wanting.

This bill of Mr. Jenckes's we hold to be the first
and greatest of the measures of reform now before
the country—the one on which most is dependent
not simply of money, but of public and private
morality. Ile has worked long and hard at it,
and it is a kind of work with which the regular
party managers have, as a rule, little sympathy.
He is not likely, we fear, to succeed without active
and outspoken support from the public, and we
trust he will receive it without stint, in season and
out of season, especially from that large class of
young men who are now interesting themselves in
politics, under the influence of the wider knowledge
and higher aspirations which the war has bred,
‘Ve trust, too, that he will be of good cheer. if
political progress consist, as we believe it does, in
the greater and greater subjection of human affairs
to the control of enlightened reason, the future be-
longs to him, and to such as he, and not to the
windy declainArmthp,..while kolding th 2 great.
horn of humanity with one hand and blowing it
lustily, generally hold with the other a leash of
hungry peculators, to be let loose at every conve-
nient opportunity on the unfortunate tax-payer.—
Anglo-American Times.

THE SWORD OF THE LATE LORD
NELSON.

. -

On Monday Mr. Cooper, barrister, accompanied
by Mr. Thomas Evans, of 27, Queen-street,
Brompton, attended before the Lord Mayor, at the
Mansion-house, Mr. Evans's object being to
make an affidavit in reference to a relic of Lord
Nelson. In that document Mr. Evans deposed in
effect, that, declining in years, he was most
anxious to set himself right with the public with
respect to the dress sword of Lord Nelson, which
he had ever implicity believed to be a most in-
teresting relic of the great hero, and which, in or
about 1816, was presented by Lord Saye and
Selo to the Governors of Greenwich Hospital, with
a view to its being placed with the celebrated coat
and waistcoat there deposited. This the Governors
had declined to do, under an impression which the
deponent trusted to be able to show was entirely
erroneous. Ile also desired to remove the prejudice
that the identity of the sword was doubtful, to
enlighten the public mind with respect to it, and
to show how he became possessed of it. Ile solemnly
and sincerely declared that he obtained the sword
from the same lady from whom Sir Harry
Nicholas procured the coat and waistcoat, in
the purchase of which the deponent was
forestalled. That lady was Mrs. Smith, who
was the wife of Mr. Joshua Jonathan Smith, Lord
Mayor of London in 1810, who declared to witness
that her husband obtained possession of the vest-
ments referrel_to __with. the sword, whiclt.Tas. then.

covered with crape, which time and moths had
partly destroyed. The relic, she said, had been given
to her husband by the celebrated Lady IlAmilton, who
had been informed the sword was taken off Lord
Nelson's coffin. In the affidavit sworn yesterday be-
fore the Lord Mayor a copy of a letter written by
Wm. Ashby, apensioner at Greenwich Hospital, was
embodied. That letter was dated Nov. 13, 1846,
and in it Mr. Ashby certified that the sword which
Mr. Evans purchased was the one which, with vari-
ous other honours, was placed on the coffin contain-
ing the body of Lord Nelson, when the remains by
in state in the Painted Flail of Greenwich Hospital
for three days, and that he was informed Nel-
son wore the same sword on the day he received
his mortal wound. To the identity of the
sword Ashby spoke positively, having had it with
the other insignia under his immediate charge for
three successive days, he being then in his capacity
of boatswain of the Palliser Ward of the hospital,
chief of a special guard appointed with ex-
press orders to prevent the removal, or the public
touch, of any of the relics. This letter was ad-
dressed to Mr. Evans, the deponent, at his then
residence, No. 17, Maddox-street. Mr. Evans also
solemnly deposed that from the time the sword came
into his possession up to his disposal of it, nothing
whatever had been done to it beyond being simply
cleaned, in which operation the workman so en-
gaged transposed the hilt, which at any time could
be easily rectified. The affidavit, of which this is
the purport, was made before the Lord Mayor, who
thereupon appended his name to it.

2111SCELLAAVEOUS i'VE I VS.