Better Government Personnel

THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY BETTER GOVERNMENT PERSONNEL* A. BRADY Among recent books on different aspec~s' of contemporary American politics and economics, Better Government Personnel is singularly significant. It is the report of the Commission of Inquiry on Public Service Personnel, appointed in December, 1933, by the Social Science Research Council, to examine the problems of public personnel within the United States, and to present to the American people a programme for future action. The magnitude and importance of the commission's task is only in part suggested by the fact that nearly one-tenth of those gainfully employed in the United States are in public service, and that in 1932 they received more than one-tenth of the national income. There is little novelty in the commission's general arguments for improvement in the personnel of the public service, but in a book designed to educate public opinion the repetition of truisms is warranted as lo11g as a lamentable apathy exists on the question, or, even worse than apathy, a point of view such as that expressed by a past president of.the United States Chamber of Commerce: "The best public servant is the worst one.... A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is} and the longer he stays, the greater is the danger." For its particular purpose, Bette,- Government Personnel is an excel- · lent piece of exposition, penetrating usually to the central sinews of the subject, and readable and understandable by the man on the street. The commission emphasizes that its recommendations can be carried into effect without cumbrous constitutional amendments. But it fails, perhaps, to recognize sufficiently that the suggested methods of recruiting public servants of the first calibre imply changes, scarcely less difficult to effect than constitutional amendments , in the character of political parties. We know too well that traditionally in Canada and the United States the composite parties, subject to varied centrifugal influences, have beerl: held together not a little by the greed for spoils, especiaJly secure and comfortable jobs on the public pay-roll. Party patronage has been the lubricant *Better Government Personnel: Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Public Service Personnel, McGraw-Hill Book Company. 144 REVIEWS of the political machine. This fact is not, as -many assume, an inevitablie accompaniment of democracy, but, since it is the product of stubborn political habits in a given social environment, its transformation cannot be achieved in a night. Parties and spoils aside, the central thesis of the commission is that every significant branch of administration, local, state,.and federal, should be made a "career service," which the ambitious· and capable may eagerly enter in youth with the expectation of advancement to positions of . honour and prestige. Such a "career service" can be firmly established in American and Canadian democratic institutions only by securing many things now hardly existing: e.g., a thorou.ghly effec.-. tive system of personnel administration in each main unit of government ; such internal organization within the service as will insure a ladder for the young and capable to climb from the bottom to posts at the top, the sole basis for advancement being capacity as demon-strated by previous performance; the elimination of dead wood where necessa~y by a system of demotions and discharges, essential to maintain the public esteem of any career; the rigorous insistence upon a probationary period in the employment of all public servants; the encouragement of civil service associations, designed to promote high professional standards within the services, and especially to exchange information with the public employees of other jurisdictions and to ca-opetate with them in the nation-wide development of service standards. · It is almost needless to say that Better Government Pe1·sonnel can be read as profitably in Canada as in the United States, for in this country similar problems. of personnel administration exist, although it is fair to say that Canadian administration has been less bedevilled by political bosses and the excessive use of the elective method in the choice of numerous officials from dog-catche.r to judge. Consider how inadequately the idea of a career in...