Mr. Pendleton. Yes sir. This testimony was taken in the month of March, I think, of the present year.
Says this gentleman further—
I have no doubt that under a rigid application of this proposed system the work of the Treasury Department could be performed with two-thirds the number of clerks now employed, and that is a moderate estimate of the saving.
Mr. President, a Senator who is now present in the Chamber and who will recognize the statement when I make it, though I shall not indicate his name, told me that the Secretary of one of the Departments of the Government said to him, perhaps to the Committee on Appropriations, at the last session, that there were seventeen clerks in his Department for whom he could find no employment; that he did need one competent clerk of a higher grade, and if the appropriation were made for that one clerk, at the proper amount according to the gradations of the service and the appropriation for the seventeen were left out, he could, without impairing the efficiency of his Department, leave those seventeen clerks off the roll; but if the appropriation should be made the personal, social, and political pressure was so great that he would be obliged to employ and pay them, though he could find no employment for them.
Need I prove, Mr. President, that which is known to all men, that a systematic pressure has been brought upon the clerks in the Departments of the Government this year to extort from them a portion of their salary under a system which the President himself scouts as being voluntary, and that they are led to believe and fairly led to believe that they have bought and paid for the offices which they hold and that the good faith of those who take from them a portion of the salary is pledged to their retention in their positions?
I have said before upon the floor of the Senate that this whole system demoralizes everybody who is engaged in it. It demoralizes the clerks who are appointed. That is inevitable. It demoralizes those who make the appointment. That also is inevitable. And it demoralizes Senators and Representatives who by the exercise of their power as Senators and Representatives exert pressure upon the appointing power.
I repeat that this system, permeating the whole civil service of the country, demoralizes everybody connected with it, the clerks, the appointing power, and those who by their official position and their relations to the executive administration of the Government have the influence necessary to put these clerks in office.
Mr. President, how can you expect purity, economy, efficiency to be found anywhere in the service of the Government if the report made by this committee to the Senate has even the semblance of truth? If the civil service of the country is to be filled up with superfluous persons, if salaries are to be increased in order that assessments may be paid, if members of Congress having friends or partisan supporters are to be able to make places for them in public employment, how can you expect Senators and Representatives to be economical and careful in the administration of the public money?
I am sure there is no Senator here who will forget a scene which we had upon the last night session of the last session, when the Senator from Iowa [Mr. Allison], the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, the official leader of the Senate, rising in his place with the last appropriation bill in his hand, and the report of the committee of conference, made a statement to the Senate of the result of the appropriations. He stated that the appropriations that were made during that session amounted to $292,000,000—I throw off the fractions—and he felicitated the Senate and himself as the organ and mouthpiece of his party, that this was an excess of only $77,000,000 over and above the expenditures of the year before. Instantly the Senator from Connecticut [Mr. Platt] rose in his place and reminded the Senator that there would be a deficiency in the Pension Bureau alone of $20,000,000 or $25,000,000. The honorable Senator from Georgia, who now occupies the chair [Mr. Brown], inquired of the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations whether there would be any deficiencies in the expenses of the current year, or whether the statement was supposed to cover probable deficiencies in addition to the appropriations, and the honorable Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Beck], certainly as familiar with all these subjects as any member of this body, rose in his place and said that notwithstanding the utmost scrutiny of the Committee on Appropriations, undoubtedly at the end of the fiscal year the ordinary deficiencies would be found.
Two hundred and ninety-two millions of dollars of regular appropriations; $20,000,000 of deficiency in one bureau alone, the usual deficiencies occurring during the course of the year of $20,000,000 more! As if this were not enough, my honorable colleague arose in his place and took up the tale and called attention to the fact that the permanent appropriations amounted annually to one hundred and thirty-seven or more millions of dollars. According to his statement made in that speech, which I am sure nobody will forget, the expenditures of the Government during this present fiscal year would amount to $402,000,000 or $403,000,000—nearly $9 a head for every man, woman, and child in the United States—more money than was appropriated for all the expenses of the Government during the first forty years of its existence, I will venture to say, though I do not speak by the book.