a session of Congress passed without serious discussion of the subject, and suggestions were sometimes made that were worthy of a heroic age, as when Senator Trumbull proposed that "any member of Congress or territorial delegate who recommended any one for office without having received a written request from the Executive should be fined one thousand dollars." Senators Wilson and Schurz had introduced similar bills, and it was only by an expedient,-happily not then too familiar-by a rider attached at the last moment to an appropriation bill that provision was made for carrying out the President's wishes. This measure left everything to the President's discretion and gave him an appropriation of $25,000 for the work of an advisory board, but Congress, though constantly agitating the subject, backed and filled, and after two years the absolutely essential appropriation was cut off. But President Grant had continued his efforts, and, as in the Wilderness in the summer of 1864, so ten years later, he seemed determined to fight it out on that line even if it took all winter, for, on the 7th of December, 1874, he announced in a message "If Congress adjourns without positive legislation on the subject of civil service reform, I will regard such action as a disapproval of the system, and will abandon it except so far as to require examinations for certain appointees to determine their fitness. Competitive examinations will be abandoned." But to this striking appeal Congress turned a deaf ear.

President Hayes, who, in his letter of acceptance, had spoken of the civil service reform as "of permanent necessity," urged strongly upon Congress the restoration of the necessary appropriation, the want of which embarrassed the work, and gave guarantees of his good faith by the appointment of Carl Schurz, the champion reformer, as Secretary of the Interior, and by commissioning Dorman B. Eaton to write a history of the civil service reform movement in Great Britain, and by the strict enforcement of the law against political assessments. Before his term of office expired, he had the satisfaction of seeing competitive examina

tions made the basis for appointments in the New York Custom House under the rules drawn up by that distinguished reformer, Silas W. Burt, and the same system applied to the New York Post Office, both of which were decided steps in advance. The crisis between President Garfield and the Senate in the spring of 1881, which had resulted in the futile resignation of Senators Conklin and Platt, had attracted renewed attention to the subject, and in the same year the National League was formed.

The names of those present at its birth, some of whom happily still survive and are still ever loyal to the cause, cannot be too often recalled. Among them were Charles J. Bonaparte of Baltimore, Roger Wolcott, Richard Henry Dana of Boston, Henry W. Sprague of Buffalo, William W. Vaughan and Morrill Wyman of Cambridge, George W. Curtis, Carl Schurz, Dorman B. Eaton, Silas W. Burt, William Cary Sanger, William H. Thomson, Everett P. Wheeler and Frederick W. Whitridge of New York and Henry Hitchcock of St. Louis. Both the living and the dead of this list have ever since contributed most richly to the progress of the cause.

I should be doing injustice to my own feelings and to yours if I did not on this occasion refer to the serious loss which the League has sustained during the present year in the death of several of its most important members.

In the death of President Daniel C. Gilman, indeed, who for seven years, from 1900 to 1907, had served you in that capacity, the League and the cause have met with an almost irreparable loss. It is true that before he became President, the cause of civil service reform had emerged from the struggles of its early fighting period, and was not only looked upon with toleration and respect by both the great organized parties of the country, but had won a lasting place in the confidence and faith of the people. But eternal vigilance was needed to secure, as far as might be, the adherence of the government in practice to the principles upon which it was based, and it was a

watchful observation of this that during the whole term of his administration as president Dr. Gilman contributed to the promotion of our work. You do not need to be told of the unspeakable value of the adhesion of a man of his remarkable character and reputation to such a cause. His extraordinary gifts, in the way of organizing power and in the faculty of selecting the right man for the right place, had been developed and demonstrated in the great places that he had previously filled. It has been well said that his sixteen years at New Haven as librarian, as professor and as secretary of the Sheffield Scientific School were an apprenticeship, so to speak, for larger undertakings. His summons to the presidency of the University of California in 1872, and his labors there to establish on firm foundations a great state university with its novel experiments in the way of the free higher education of the youth of the state, gave him a brief opportunity for usefulness in that sphere of which he did not fail to avail himself, but from there he was soon called to what I think must be regarded as the most valuable work of his life in the establishment of graduate study in the new university of Johns Hopkins of Baltimore. His twenty-five years of service there in an entirely novel field, with its varied exigencies of hardship and success, called into play the special faculties of organization and selection of men which I have sought particularly to emphasize, and the imitation or rather the reproduction of his work there in the other great universities of the land has demonstrated how well that work was done. It was these same qualities that attracted the attention of the board of trustees of the Carnegie Institute, when they made him their president for the first three years. Graduate study and original research may be said to have been the specialties of Dr. Gilman, and wholly apart from his work in the Reform League he had thereby become one of the foremost educators and thinkers of the country. His accession, therefore, to the presidency of this society and his continuance in it for seven years was an immense boon to its continued prosperity. Year

after year he attended its meetings and by his interesting and characteristic addresses kept the subject of its work continuously fresh in the popular mind. His good nature and patience-and those are the two qualities that have been most serviceable always in the promotion of the work of the League-were never failing. His interest in the cause never flagged, and it was only when the "impediment of age" began to tell too seriously upon him, that he resigned the headship of the League, which he had so satisfactorily filled. He was always full of hope, courage and good cheer. If others faltered and lost courage he was ever ready to point to the great examples of other reforms that had fought their way to success under all sorts of delays and discouragements. "Let me remind you," he said, "of the passage of the reform bill and the Catholic emancipation, and of the removal of the disabilities of the Jews, and of the repeal of the corn laws in Great Britain. In our own country remember how long it was between the repeal of the Missouri compromise and the emancipation proclamation. Let me mention also the opposition to public schools which frustrated for many years the efforts of Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, efforts which ultimately led to the adoption throughout the land of that bulwark of national liberty the American method of popular education," and appealing to the great victories already achieved for civil service reform, he urged us to press on with new confidence to the future.

The National League, and this assembly which greets it on this anniversary, may well pause to pay a just tribute to the memory of President Gilman.

The death of ex-President Grover Cleveland, who since December, 1900, had been a vice president of the League and was one of the early champions of reform in public service, has deprived us of a great and noble example.

It was while he was governor of New York that the civil service law of that state was passed in 1883. In his first term as President, he extended the classification by adding 7,258 places to the classified lists,

and, in his second term, he added over 40,000 places more, and, on the 14th of July, 1886, he issued his famous "pernicious political activity" order which is still in force. It is impossible to realize the difficulties that lie in the way of a President, however zealous for the general cause of civil service reform, in carrying it out in actual practice against the tremendous and often irresistible pressure of party and circumstances and powerful advocates of special appointments, and although President Cleveland, like almost every other President, yielded at times to this pressure it cannot be denied that first and last he was a steadfast friend of the cause.

Professor Fish well says "The second administration of Grover Cleveland brought mingled gall and sweetness to the believers in a non-political civil service. Congress was more eager for spoils than the government was to give them. Throughout the term, however, order followed order extending the service by providing for the classification of lighthouse keepers, for the clerical force in the pension agency and culminating in the regulation of May 6, 1896, which simplified and improved the whole system and added 29,397 officers to the list of those under the commission, making a total of 85,000 out of a service of about 205,000."

I ought not to pass without mention the fact of the death of two other distinguished friends of our principles, both vice presidents of the League. I mean the Right-Rev. Bishop Potter, who died in July after being for thirty years a member of the New York Association, and vice president of the League from 1892 to the time of his death, and William Potts of Philadelphia, who died in the same month, having been secretary of the New York Association and the National League for a very long period of years and a member of the Council at the time of his death. Both of these distinguished and patriotic citizens were ever faithful friends and advocates of the work of the League.

While great credit is due to all the founders of the