The first effort of myself and my colleagues was to secure the genuine enforcement of the law.  In this we succeeded after a number of lively fights.  But of course in these fights we were obliged to strike a large number of influential politicians, some of them in Congress, some of them the supporters and backers of men who were in Congress.  Accordingly we soon found ourselves engaged in a series of contests with prominent Senators and Congressmen.  There were a number of Senators and Congressmen—­men like Congressman (afterwards Senator) H. C. Lodge, of Massachusetts; Senator Cushman K. Davis, of Minnesota; Senator Orville H. Platt, of Connecticut; Senator Cockrell, of Missouri; Congressman (afterwards President) McKinley, of Ohio, and Congressman Dargan, of South Carolina—­who abhorred the business of the spoilsman, who efficiently and resolutely championed the reform at every turn, and without whom the whole reform would certainly have failed.  But there were plenty of other Senators and Congressmen who hated the whole reform and everything concerned with it and everybody who championed it; and sometimes, to use a legal phrase, their hatred was for cause, and sometimes it was peremptory—­that is, sometimes the Commission interfered with their most efficient, and incidentally most corrupt and unscrupulous, supporters, and at other times, where there was no such interference, a man nevertheless had an innate dislike of anything that tended to decency in government.  These men were always waging war against us, and they usually had the more or less open support of a certain number of Government officials, from Cabinet officers down.  The Senators and Congressmen in question opposed us in many different ways.  Sometimes, for instance, they had committees appointed to investigate us—­during my public career without and within office I grew accustomed to accept appearances before investigating committees as part of the natural order of things.  Sometimes they tried to cut off the appropriation for the Commission.

Occasionally we would bring to terms these Senators or Congressmen who fought the Commission by the simple expedient of not holding examinations in their districts.  This always brought frantic appeals from their constituents, and we would explain that unfortunately the appropriations had been cut, so that we could not hold examinations in every district, and that obviously we could not neglect the districts of those Congressmen who believed in the reform and therefore in the examinations.  The constituents then turned their attention to the Congressman, and the result was that in the long run we obtained sufficient money to enable us to do our work.  On the whole, the most prominent leaders favored us.  Any man who is the head of a big department, if he has any fitness at all, wishes to see that department run well; and a very little practical experience shows him that it cannot be run well if he must make his appointments to please spoilsmongering