politicians.  As with almost every reform that I have ever undertaken, most of the opposition took the guise of shrewd slander.  Our opponents relied chiefly on downright misrepresentation of what it was that we were trying to accomplish, and of our methods, acts, and personalities.  I had more than one lively encounter with the authors and sponsors of these misrepresentations, which at the time were full of interest to me.  But it would be a dreary thing now to go over the record of exploded mendacity, or to expose the meanness and malice shown by some men of high official position.  A favorite argument was to call the reform Chinese, because the Chinese had constructed an inefficient governmental system based in part on the theory of written competitive examinations.  The argument was simple.  There had been written examinations in China; it was proposed to establish written examinations in the United States; therefore the proposed system was Chinese.  The argument might have been applied still further.  For instance, the Chinese had used gunpowder for centuries; gunpowder is used in Springfield rifles; therefore Springfield rifles were Chinese.  One argument is quite as logical as the other.  It was impossible to answer every falsehood about the system.  But it was possible to answer certain falsehoods, especially when uttered by some Senator or Congressman of note.  Usually these false statements took the form of assertions that we had asked preposterous questions of applicants.  At times they also included the assertion that we credited people to districts where they did not live; this simply meaning that these persons were not known to the active ward politicians of those districts.

One opponent with whom we had a rather lively tilt was a Republican Congressman from Ohio, Mr. Grosvenor, one of the floor leaders.  Mr. Grosvenor made his attack in the House, and enumerated our sins in picturesque rather than accurate fashion.  There was a Congressional committee investigating us at the time, and on my next appearance before them I asked that Mr. Grosvenor be requested to meet me before the committee.  Mr. Grosvenor did not take up the challenge for several weeks, until it was announced that I was leaving for my ranch in Dakota; whereupon, deeming it safe, he wrote me a letter expressing his ardent wish that I should appear before the committee to meet him.  I promptly canceled my ticket, waited, and met him.  He proved to be a person of happily treacherous memory, so that the simple expedient of arranging his statements in pairs was sufficient to reduce him to confusion.  For instance, he had been trapped into making the unwary remark, “I do not want to repeal the Civil Service Law, and I never said so.”  I produced the following extract from one of his speeches:  “I will vote not only to strike out this provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law.”  To this he merely replied that there was “no inconsistency between those two statements.”  He asserted