So much for the objections to the examinations.  Now for the objections to the men who advocated the reform.  As a rule these men were high-minded and disinterested.  Certain of them, men like the leaders in the Maryland and Indiana Reform Associations, for instances, Messrs. Bonaparte and Rose, Foulke and Swift, added common sense, broad sympathy, and practical efficiency to their high-mindedness.  But in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston there really was a certain mental and moral thinness among very many of the leaders in the Civil Service Reform movement.  It was this quality which made them so profoundly antipathetic to vigorous and intensely human people of the stamp of my friend Joe Murray—­who, as I have said, always felt that my Civil Service Reform affiliations formed the one blot on an otherwise excellent public record.  The Civil Service Reform movement was one from above downwards, and the men who took the lead in it were not men who as a rule possessed a very profound sympathy with or understanding of the ways of thought and life of their average fellow-citizen.  They were not men who themselves desired to be letter-carriers or clerks or policemen, or to have their friends appointed to these positions.  Having no temptation themselves in this direction, they were eagerly anxious to prevent other people getting such appointments as a reward for political services.  In this they were quite right.  It would be impossible to run any big public office to advantage save along the lines of the strictest application of Civil Service Reform principles; and the system should be extended throughout our governmental service far more widely than is now the case.

But there are other and more vital reforms than this.  Too many Civil Service Reformers, when the trial came, proved tepidly indifferent or actively hostile to reforms that were of profound and far-reaching social and industrial consequence.  Many of them were at best lukewarm about movements for the improvement of the conditions of toil and life among men and women who labor under hard surroundings, and were positively hostile to movements which curbed the power of the great corporation magnates and directed into useful instead of pernicious channels the activities of the great corporation lawyers who advised them.

Most of the newspapers which regarded themselves as the especial champions of Civil Service Reform and as the highest exponents of civic virtue, and which distrusted the average citizen and shuddered over the “coarseness” of the professional politicians, were, nevertheless, given to vices even more contemptible than, although not so gross as, those they denounced and derided.  Their editors were refined men of cultivated tastes, whose pet temptations were backbiting, mean slander, and the snobbish worship of anything clothed in wealth and the outward appearances of conventional respectability.  They were not robust or powerful men; they felt ill at ease in the company of rough,