The Merit System and the Higher Offices

There is no question of national policy so firmly established as the merit system, and on it must finally rest our political and administrative fabric. The system is fundamental, as it underlies all other political reforms. Its processes, therefore, should be adequate and be made to ensure results which will keep pace with the ever increasing functions of government. These processes are especially important in supplying the needs of appointment to the higher technical and administrative positions. The extension of the merit system to higher positions is a logical development of its application to lower positions. The same reasons which require tests of fitness in the latter apply even more strongly to such of the higher positions as have nothing to do with the policies of the administration. Such an extension would have the additional and great advantage that the more important the office affected the more effective must the extension necessarily be in divorcing the office from politics. Character and capacity are being secured in the great body of public employment, and it only remains to take the higher officials whose duties are purely administrative, federal, state and municipal, out of politics, to establish finally in the minds of the people the fundamental truth that positions under a democratic government belong to the people and not to the political party temporarily in power. The higher subordinates in the government employ have administrative control of the work on which our economic structure and our industrial success largely depend; and it must follow that their selection should be made upon proved merit, if that degree of administrative success is to be obtained which the people of this country have a right to expect. It is through the highest officials down to the humblest employees that the government serves the people.