Well, then, the alarm has already been sounded. We do not refer to the “tariff reform”—though that may be fatal—but to more certain matters over which the tariff laws have no power. It is affirmed that the character, social status, aspirations and self-respect of workmen in this country has already fallen. An observer in a manufacturing center recently said: “The change in ten years is frightful. The old hands have risen in life or gone west. The new hands live in smaller quarters, care less for the comfort of their families, and buy fewer goods of any kind. They read less, take newspapers more rarely, are less careful to dress well on Sunday, and see their children in rags with a complacency which was unknown ten years ago. The new people are from Europe, and nine in ten of them have brought their old habits with them. Higher wages mean to them only more rum and more idleness.”
We hope that this is an exaggeration. But even if it be only very partially true, it opens an unexpected vista, and an alarming one. The only way to maintain workmen’s wages is to keep up workmen’s characters. If the character grows debased the wages will drop to that lower level. A higher grade of living is the only possible security for higher wages. Workmen can not long get high wages to spend in rum shops. Wages will sink to the level of their life. But if the common market is to suffer so great a loss as this fall in wages and consuming power would occasion, then we must all suffer. Nor is this all. The failure would be that of our civilization. We are, every way, in all sources, most deeply interested in arresting the threatened decline of the American workman.
EFFICIENCY AND TENURE.
The tenure of office in this country will be the subject of animated discussion for some years. Civil Service Reform aims to correct an abuse, and will probably achieve that end; but it is not certain that the right method of reform has been found. The ideal of good service is presented by a bank in which men serve indefinitely, and yet must serve efficiently. They are removed if they fail; they are not removed if they succeed. The difficulty in applying this rule to any form of public service lies in removals for cause. How to secure the removal of the man who fails? In the bank it is a simple thing to discharge a clerk. In public life it is not at all simple or easy. The clerk has no vested right to his place in the bank; in a department at Washington, a clerk has a vested right to his place. The bank removes because it chooses to do so. The government must invent some pretext or prove inefficiency. Tenure during good behavior makes a quasi property of the office.
The ministry presents a good example of the workings of office tenure. Thousands of churches are without installed pastors, and one of the reasons given is that churches find it easier to install a man than to dismiss him. In the Methodist Church a hot discussion over the rule which limits continuous service in one church to three years has afforded good observers a fine opportunity to see the play of feeling and motive around the tenure principle. The change proposed has met with a crushing defeat, because Methodists are more anxious to keep the power to get rid of a poor pastor than they are to get the power to keep a good one. Why? Because they have much more experience of inefficient men than of efficient men. In short, the church says to itself: “Pastors usually fail; they rarely succeed; it is best to be able to send them away quietly.” This is not complimentary to the ministry, but it is the substance of the argument which has defeated a plan which had the sympathy of the best men in Methodism. The fact that in other denominations changes of pastors are about as frequent as among Methodists has the same explanation. For some reason the inefficient ministers are believed to be more numerous than the efficient. There is a suspicion in the general mind that this is true all round the circle of salaried life, and that we need swift and easy and decorous means of removing our public and semi-public servants more than we need to fortify the good men in their positions. In the large view, what ails us is poor work; and people in general think that the poor work is already tied fast to us. The human nature of the public has been too much overlooked. The human nature of the employed has hardly ever received appropriate attention. There are two kinds of persons to be considered in estimating the effect of time limits in any service. To one kind of man security of tenure is a means of increased efficiency. He is zealous and enterprising in his vocation. He is acutely conscientious toward his employers, the more so the less they are visible and near to him. To be secure in his place is to this man freedom to do good work and conduct his career to fruitful issues. Any other tenure means to him a harassing uncertainty in all plans and wearying anxieties about bread and butter questions. Such a man can not serve a cause of any kind well on an uncertain or limited tenure of office. The only possible uncertainty for him—the only one consistent with good work—is that which concerns the quality of his work. That species of uncertainty is one which he feels to be in his power. He will do his work so well that no uncertainty shall exist. But at the other extreme is a man to whose success the sense of security is fatal. He works best under the whip of uncertainty. He becomes lazy when the fear of removal does not exist. Between the two extremes—conscientious enthusiasm at one end and place-keeping inefficiency at the other—are men of a variety of tendencies to one or the other character. Colleges probably present the best view of the effect of security of tenure. The general public does not possess intimate knowledge of the results of the system in seats of learning; but now and then an intestine broil uncovers the college life, and invariably discloses an unsatisfactory condition. For a good professor fixed tenure is most wholesome; for a poor one it is unwholesome in its effects on his character and work. A man of wide experience in colleges tells us that there is not a college in the country but is lugging inefficient men; and he expresses the opinion that less than half of the college men are the best men for their places. In short, even in the college, unfit men get places and keep them, to the great detriment of the college. In an average institution four thoroughly good men carry six other men. A few give the college its character; the majority are a burden, and some men in this majority gloat over their supposed right to be lugged by the college. Any rule which should rid colleges of mere place-holders, of men weak in character, negligent in work, and far behind the times in scholarship would double the usefulness and the patronage of colleges in ten years. But if certainty of tenure is bad in college, it must be worse elsewhere.
What is generally desired in the matter of tenure in service of any sort is to cut off the chances for the purchase and sale of places, and for the capricious and interested removal of good men. The scandals growing up in public life from this base caprice in the appointing power have sickened the popular stomach. Take, for example, the forced resignation of a stenographer, at the end of a session, in order that the speaker of the House of Representatives might appoint his own nephew to the place for the vacation, during which there were no duties. The filthiness of the proceeding surpasses belief; and yet it seems not to have provoked any proper indignation in Congress. But fixed tenure has more evils than it cures, and some middle way should be found. We can not afford to ignore the fact that average men need the spur. The highly conscientious and enterprising servant is yet too rare in the world for it to be safe to adjust the terms of service to his character and to leave the majority free from the whip.
