him against accepting the appointment, because, they said, it
would shelve him, politically, use up his brains which ought to
be spent on higher work, and allow the country which was just
beginning to know him to forget his existence. Men drop out of
sight so quickly at Washington unless they can stand on some
pedestal which raises them above the multitude.

The Optimist of the future, to hasten whose coming we are all
making the world so irresistibly attractive, will be endowed, let
us hope, with a sense of humor. With that, he can read history as
a cosmic joke-book, and not as the Biography of the Devil, as
many of us moderns, besides Jean Paul, have found it. How long it
has taken, and how much blood has been spilt before this or that
most obvious folly has been abolished! With what absurd tenacity
have men flown in the face of reason and flouted common sense! So
our Optimist, looking into the conditions which made Civil
Service Reform imperative, will shed tears either of pity or of
laughter.

As long ago as the time of the cave-dweller, who was clothed in
shaggy hair instead of in broadcloth or silk, prehistoric man
learned that the best arrow or spear was that tipped with the
best piece of flint. In brief, to do good work, you must have
good tools. Translated into the terms of today, this means that
the expert or specialist must be preferred to the untrained. In
nearly all walks of life this truth was taken for granted, except
in affairs connected with government and administration. A
President might be elected, not because he was experienced in
these matters, but because he had won a battle, or was the
compromise candidate between two other aspirants. As it was with