I have already advocated, in my last annual message, the adoption of a civil-service retirement system, with a contributory feature to it so as to reduce to a minimum the cost to the Government of the pensions to be paid.  After considerable reflection, I am very much opposed to a pension system that involves no contribution from the employees.  I think the experience of other governments justifies this view; but the crying necessity for some such contributory system, with possibly a preliminary governmental outlay, in order to cover the initial cost and to set the system going at once while the contributions are accumulating, is manifest on every side.  Nothing will so much promote the economy and efficiency of the Government as such a system.

Elimination of all local offices from politics.

I wish to renew again my recommendation that all the local offices throughout the country, including collectors of internal revenue, collectors of customs, postmasters of all four classes, immigration commissioners and marshals, should be by law covered into the classified service, the necessity for confirmation by the Senate be removed, and the President and the others, whose time is now taken up in distributing this patronage under the custom that has prevailed since the beginning of the Government in accordance with the recommendation of the Senators and Congressmen of the majority party, should be relieved from this burden.  I am confident that such a change would greatly reduce the cost of administering the Government, and that it would add greatly to its efficiency.  It would take away the power to use the patronage of the Government for political purposes.  When officers are recommended by Senators and Congressmen from political motives and for political services rendered, it is impossible to expect that while in office the appointees will not regard their tenure as more or less dependent upon continued political service for their patrons, and no regulations, however stiff or rigid, will prevent this, because such regulations, in view of the method and motive for selection, are plainly inconsistent and deemed hardly worthy of respect.

***

State of the Union Address
William H. Taft
December 3, 1912

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To the Senate and House of Representatives: 

The foreign relations of the United States actually and potentially affect the state of the Union to a degree not widely realized and hardly surpassed by any other factor in the welfare of the whole Nation.  The position of the United States in the moral, intellectual, and material relations of the family of nations should be a matter of vital interest to every patriotic citizen.  The national prosperity and power impose upon us duties which we can not shirk if we are to be true to our ideals.  The tremendous growth of the export trade of the United States has already made that trade a