Arizona republican., 1902-11-22
CURRENT COMMENT
s-'EF-.s!--E'4-F.s.F-F-:9.9.99.+-F.FF.9-FF.l Civil Servants and the Suffrage.

Plinys remark about Africa, that there was always something new com ing out of it. may now be applied to Australia. That commonwealth is at present the pre-eminent and supreme land of new fangled notions in politics and sociology. Some of it's schemes are doubtless good, such as the Aus tralian ballot-thOugh we are not at all sure that Australia deserves full credit for it-and the Torrens system of land registration. Some features of the Australian and New Zealand schemes of industrial arbitration also appear to be commendable. But there are other antipOdal notions which seem simply fantastic and which we cannot persuade ourselves the world will ever generally adopt, or which, indeed, Aus tralia itself will find permanently sat isfactory.
 Such is the proposal, reported few days ago, to deprive civil servants of the suffrage. We are told that the Victorian ministry is actually consid- ering the question of introducing a bill for withholding the ordinary legislative suffrage from all members of the civil service, but letting the latter elect two special representatives to the as sembly and one to the senate. The in- citing cause Of this extraordinary pro- posal is obvious. The civil servants in that country are numerous, including more than ten thousand employees or the state railroads, and they have been using their political power for their own gain. In not a few constituencies they hold the balance of power. and are able to dictate the election Of legisla- tors pledged to promote their interests in the direction of increasing salaries and decreasing the amount of labor to be done by them. Not many weeks ago they threatened a general strike and a complete "tieup" of all the railroads and mail service rather than submit to a small decrease of salaries yVnicn the straitened condition of the state treasury seemed to make necessary It was only through an extraordinary manifestation of public opinion against them that they were for the time dis suaded from ordering the strike. but they issued a manifesto menacingly phrased, in which they made it per fectly clear that they proposed to use both the power of the ballot and the power of striking for their own ad- vantage whenever an suspicious op- pOTluniIy was presented.
 It is for the purpose of depriving them of their power at the polls, and thus in the state legislature. that the ministry is thinking Of depriving them Of the suffrage. But it will doubtless seem to many people that the remedy is more menacing than the disease. To enact such law would be to make of civil servants a peculiar and inferior caste, excluded from the common rights of citizens. They would be not so much the servants as the slaves of the state. In such circumstances it would not be easy to induce self-re- specting and competent men to enter the public service, while the moral ef- feet of such practical Ostracism upon those who did enter could scarcely fail to be bad. The members of the civil service would be made to feel that they had net the same interest in the state that other citizens had, but that they were political Ishmaelites, who would be justified in taking whatever they could lay their hands upon They would become a mere band of merce- naries, and the service would almost certainly become inefficient and cor rupt.-New York Tribune.