The foregoing amendments are hereby approved.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

UNITED STATES CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION,
  Washington, D.C., October 31, 1888.

The PRESIDENT.

SIR:  The order heretofore approved by you authorizing noncompetitive examinations under General Rule III, section 2, clause (e), to test fitness for certain designated places in the classified departmental service, included among such places the following: 

In the office of the Treasurer of the United States, seventeen clerks employed as expert money tellers.

The attempts thus far made to make appointments to these places under this order have fully satisfied the Commission and the Treasury Department of the impracticability of this method of procedure, not because of any difficulty of applying suitable tests to determine the expertness required, but because there are really no experts to be tested.  The duties of these positions can not be learned elsewhere than in the positions themselves, and therefore the only experts are those now occupying them and the very few who have left them for one cause or another, but who are not seeking to return.  Therefore, since experts are not available, and persons will have to be appointed who must learn the duties of the positions in the actual performance of those duties, there would seem to be no good reason why such persons should not be selected from the eligible registers of this Commission, which are at all times abundantly supplied with the names of persons who are both competent and worthy.  And besides, so long as these tempting places are in the noncompetitive list, the Department will be subjected to solicitation and pressure concerning them which it would rather avoid.

In view of these considerations it is respectfully recommended that you approve the revocation of so much of the order above referred to as provides for the appointment upon noncompetitive examination of seventeen clerks in the office of the Treasurer of the United States employed as expert money tellers.

I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,

CHAS. LYMAN,
  Commissioner in Charge.

Approved, November 13, 1888.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

FOURTH ANNUAL MESSAGE.

WASHINGTON, December 3, 1888.

To the Congress of the United States: 

As you assemble for the discharge of the duties you have assumed as the representatives of a free and generous people, your meeting is marked by an interesting and impressive incident.  With the expiration of the present session of the Congress the first century of our constitutional existence as a nation will be completed.

Our survival for one hundred years is not sufficient to assure us that we no longer have dangers to fear in the maintenance, with all its promised blessings, of a government founded upon the freedom of the people.  The time rather admonishes us to soberly inquire whether in the past we have always closely kept in the course of safety, and whether we have before us a way plain and clear which leads to happiness and perpetuity.