Clark, Lindley D

Nowlin, Homer E.

McCraight, John G

METHOD OF MAKING THE APPORTIONMENT.

The civil-service act requires all appointments in the classified departmental service made through examination to be apportioned among the several States and Territories and the District of Columbia, upon the basis of population as ascertained at the last preceding census. * It has been found impossible to make and maintain such an apportionment with mathematical exactness, but it has been equitably maintained with respect to most of the States. A very few of the States and nearly all of the Territories have received relatively an excessive share of appointments as compared with the other States. The excess is notable with respect to the District of Columbia, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Montana, Rhode Island, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, North Dakota, Connecticut, West Virginia, Florida, New

* It has been proposed that no appointments shall be made in the Departments at Washington save from those States which have not their full quota of all the places in the Departments. It is not necessary to point out the impracticability of this scheme, which proposes to take into account appointments made in the unclassified and excepted positions over which the Commission has no control. The only proposition which it is necessary to discuss at all is that in making new appointments the Commission should consider the residence claimed by those already in the classified service. The Commission believes that to do this would be unwise and mischievous to a degree. The people appointed by the Commission have complied with rigid requirements in proof of residence, and with comparatively few exceptions have been actual residents of the States claimed by them. The utmost looseness obtained in requiring proof of residence in the case of those appointed before the examinations went into effect. The assertion of the individual himself or of his Representative in Congress was accepted as sufficient. It would be manifestly unjust, when the tests differ so radically, to require admission to the service to be under the severe tests of the Commission while the people already in office were judged by an entirely different and utterly lax test. It is unjust to allow an appointment to be charged against a State's quota and afterwards, when the man has changed his residence to another State, in turn to count him against that State's quota, although his original appointment in no way inured to that State's benefit. If such a provision were adopted by Congress the appointments would be likely for years to come to go to a very small number of States; and the States about Washington would probably never get any appointments at all because, as appointments were made from outside States the appointees would change their residences to the States near Washington and thus would continually fill their quotas with persons appointed from other States who have no claim whatsoever to be charged to any state save those from which they originally came. This last consideration is enough to show the absurdity of the proposition to take into account the people already in office. There is only one safe plan to follow, and that is the plan adopted by the Commission to apportion appointments merely in the classified service. This results in securing practically exact equality, and when the law has been in existence long enough, as the people appointed before it went into effect disappear from the service, the equality among those holding office will be practically exact.

It is sometimes necessary to point out to gentlemen who express dissatisfaction at the way in which appointments are apportioned under the civil-service law, that "the whole is the sum of its parts," and that it is impossible for each State to be behind all others in this particular; yet Representatives of every State and Territory, without a single exception, have at one time or another complained to the Commission that the particular State or Territory which they represent does not receive its full quota of appointments, while from Maryland, the District, and Virginia complaint is made that they are charged with appointments which really do not belong to them, it being alleged that people come to the District or its immediate neighborhood who are really residents of distant States, but domicile themselves here, and then are charged to a region where they had no ties until they took service under the Government.

As far as the apportionment made by the Commission is concerned, the Commission asserts.positively that any inequality is due solely to the defective nature of the law of domicile. The Commission has been rigid in requiring all reasonable proof of domicile. At one time it required that applicants should have bodily residence in the State from which they claimed residence, and should themselves have been present therein for at least six months preceding the date of the application, but it was obliged to recede from this position under an opinion of the Attorney-General, who thought that the Commission should only require such proof of domicile as was authorized by law.

In spite of this vagueness of the law of domicile the Commission repeats its emphatic belief that under its jurisdiction the apportionment of appointments has been kept substantially even, so far as the conditions of good administration will permit.