chances either way, but there is greater probability of maintaining a vital, living, progressive organization under the system now in force in Pennsylvania than under a rigid civil service which we must all recognize as being susceptible of political manipulation, as is any other governmental agency.

For successful, well-rounded social welfare 'administration in the state service, with a coordinated policy and program, with proper relative emphasis in all fields, and with a minimum of duplication of effort, the Pennsylvania plan is most satisfactory, for it brings together under one executive head the fields of mental health, adult dependency, juvenile dependency and delinquency, and penal affairs, with their custodial and their preventive and curative phases as well.

This implies that there shall be a measure of central control, both fiscal and professional, by the administrative department, of the activities of "welfare institutions" if a "continuing and progressive policy" is to be maintained. Undoubtedly a state board of control can more quickly and easily arrive at a revolution of standards and methods, fiscal and professional, for better (but also for worse) than is the case in a modified form of decentralized control.

Pennsylvania has, in four years, moved from the absolute decentralization of her institutional administration-which had resulted in great diversity and irregularity of standards of service and costs-to a modified form of centralized control through the welfare department, which is slowly but surely bringing up the more backward institutions to a professional standard which can be considered satisfactory, and is equalizing costs of rendering equivalent service.

This is being accomplished, not by "big stick" methods, but by educational processes carried on through trained members of our central office staff; by continuous pressure toward minimum standards, which are subject to voluntary adoption by the individual superintendents and trustees of the backward institutions; and by budgetary control as part of the state budget system, which is but two years old in Pennsylvania.

This process of education, minimum standards, and voluntary adoption of the proposed improvements, it must be recognized, is a slow and sometimes painful process, but the end results are bound to be a coherent, progressive, voluntarily adopted welfare policy and program which it will require an earthquake to overturn.

It is obvious that the institutional program, as well as the extramural activities, depend upon the personnel assembled and appropriations available to make them effective, and here again job specifications, qualifications of personnel, and adequate salary inducements, promotion and retirement provisions, must be considered if we are to have a "continuing and progressive policy," as is the case in the central administrative department. The quality of the superintendent and his (or her) qualification as a specialist in his given field is an essential factor in the continuing and progressive policy in public institutions.

In addition, an institutional program presents certain other factors which must be considered if perpetual "labor turnover" both professional, domestic, and mechanical, is to be avoided, with the consequent loss of continuity and progress.

Again Pennsylvania experience seems to indicate that a higher type of personnel with longer tenure of service can be secured if the institution is: first, located within reasonable distance of urban facilities; second, if housing of the professional, nursing, domestic, mechanical, and farm staff is suitable to the needs of the respective groups; third, if within the institution suitable recreational facilities are provided. (Our institutions are, for the most part, located at a distance from cities, and our housing facilities in many institutions are most inadequate.)

Lack of these facilities in many of our institutions has resulted in an enormous turnover among employees and has made it exceedingly difficult to secure men and women of high caliber in the upper ranges of professional and executive service. Instances could be multiplied of overcrowding, lack of privacy, overwork, excessively long hours, inadequate supervision and consequent lack of morale and deteriorating professional service, all due to lack of simple creature comforts which should have been provided for our institutional employees. Suffice it, however, to say that we have these important but simple factors very much to the fore, together with just and adequate salaries, as a basis for a "continuing and progressive policy" in our public welfare institutional work.

In institutions, as in the administrative department, the disadvantages of civil service outweigh the advantages. Employees who are responsible to a nebulous impersonal agency, hundreds of miles away, have a temptation to "soldier" on the job, and are far less likely to render 100 per cent efficient service, than in the case when under the eye of the responsible head of the institution who "hires and fires" on merit and efficiency.

The state is one of the largest employers of labor, professional, technical, domestic, etc., in any commonwealth. It is important that the salary and wage schedule for the state service should be worked out on an ethically and economically sound basis. Such a salary schedule is the backbone of a "continuing and progressive policy," for to a high degree it insures the employment of good public servants and their continuance in office for a considerable period.

Such a salary schedule has been worked out for Pennsylvania, not by the department of welfare, but by a special group, attached to the office of the secretary of the commonwealth, in conference with the heads of various administrative departments.

The professional, technical, vocational, and clerical grades as to qualification and compensation are the same for the administrative departments at the capitol and in the institutions throughout the state. The institutional classifica

tion, domestic, farm, etc., dovetails into this in an orderly sequence, the whole system being based on the theory of a living wage, supply, and demand.

This effective salary standardization was predicated upon a careful study of every job in each institution, and brought to light not only glaring irregularities in payment for the same task, but, in certain institutions, extreme undercompensation for some types of work, with overpayment for other types. This standardization of job specification, together with equalization of salary or wage throughout the public service, will do much to stabilize our public social work. To summarize: Granting that our "continuing and progressive policy in public social work" must be secured in spite of a careless electorate and politically entangled state executives, our greatest assurance of success lies in: first, an unpaid citizens' commission type of organization which removes the policies, the executive secretary and staff, and the institutions as far as possible from political interference; second, full publicity (not propaganda) as to policies, problems, and methods of work of the department, so that the people and other public officials may understand what is being done and why; third, a welltrained, mature professional staff for the administrative department and institutions, together with properly qualified subordinate employees, adequately paid, properly housed, with a suitable retirement system, but without civil service provisions; fourth, a coordination, under one chief executive, of all public social work in the fields of mental health, dependency (adult and juvenile), delinquency, and crime, in order that a coherent program may be formulated and carried out with a minimum of overlapping and a minimum of cost to the taxpayer.

1

CIVIL SERVICE AND PERSONNEL WORK

IN PUBLIC DEPARTMENTS

James H. Pershing, Denver

The primary objective of the merit system of appointment to public employment is the improvement of the personnel of the civil service as distinguished from the military service, but it carries with it as a necessary outcome the elevation of political life above a partisan struggle for the spoils of office to a loftier plane where only men and principles shall be considered.

As water cannot rise above its source, so the best results in the personnel of public employees cannot be attained in the absence of the highest quality of character and devotion to the public interest and administrative ability among those whose duty it is to apply the system, as laid down in the law, to the public service of the state. The personnel of the administrative heads and employees in all departments of government and public institutions in Colorado are so dependent upon, and intertwined with, the personnel of the Civil Service Commission, that it will be necessary to consider them together, and their

effect upon public business and the social work done in the various public institutions.

The first Colorado statute providing for the merit system of appointments to state positions was enacted in 1907, after ten years of effort by the Denver Civil Service Reform Association before five successive general assemblies. Great credit is due the late Governor Buchtel, who insisted upon the passage of this law in fulfilment by his party of a precampaign pledge, and to Hon. W. W. Booth, of Denver, who introduced it in the Senate and secured its adoption. The act was limited in its application to subordinate positions in all state institutions except those that were educational, and not reformatory or charitable, in character. It was an admirably drawn instrument and furnished a good beginning for the application of the merit system in this state. The excellent work of the first state commission appointed by Governor Buchtel was greatly impeded by the hostility of successive state legislatures in refusing to appropriate the necessary funds to cover the expense of administering the law.

To remedy this situation, at the general election of November, 1912, a law was initiated by petition, and adopted by the people of the state by a large vote, which amended the act of 1907 in several important respects.

It extended the classified service to include all appointive heads of state departments and all employees of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of state government; it abolished all fixed terms for employment, and substituted appointments for good behavior and provided for a continuing appropriation for an irreducible minimum of the expenses required for the administration of the law, which would make the commission to that extent independent of the legislature, which, however, was expected to appropriate for all necessary expenses in excess of that minimum. When this latter expectation was not realized, the minimum continuing appropriation enabled the state commission for the first time to achieve some concrete results, both in efficiency and economy, in the various departments of the state government and its principal institutions, which conspicuously justified all that had been claimed by the proponents of the law. The commission, in its fourth biennial report for the year 1913-14, called attention in detail to the gratifying results obtained in the administration of the various departments of the state and its institutions, from which the following instances are taken as illustrations showing the great advantage to the state of selecting its appointees for fitness ascertained by competitive examination over the old system of appointment by political or personal favor.

The state printing commissioner, in his biennial report, showed a saving of $8,000 over any year in the preceding decade, notwithstanding a greater amount of printing done. The game and fish department, for the first time in the history of the state, became self-supporting, although largely increased in efficiency and output. The inspector of oils showed a gain of nearly $15,000, which was in strong contrast to all preceding administration of this office which

had been conducted at a loss to the state, as all collections made were treated as perquisites of the inspector! The warden of the reformatory at Buena Vista had, in ten months, changed the whole moral atmosphere of the institution and brought it up to a high standard. He had doubled the herd of live stock from the sale of farm products. He had produced 80 per cent more crops than in the previous year, and, although he reduced the number of guards, he had not had a single escape.

The same character of results were shown in all the departments whose chiefs were placed in the classified service. These important results came, not only because the heads of these departments were themselves trained men, but because, being appointed for good behavior, they were directly interested in making good records for their several departments. In addition, they were in hearty sympathy with the efforts of the commission to furnish them with capable and efficient employees, all of which meant their active cooperation with the commission.

The law, as it then stood, was in advance of any previously adopted in any of the United States, in that it included for the first time in the classified service the chiefs of all state departments. It also included the employees of the general assembly, in which the state of Wisconsin alone had led the way by one or two years. In Colorado this last inclusion was only partially put into operation in the first assembly after the initiated law went into effect, but with remarkable results in economy in this most wasteful field for political patronage.

As can readily be imagined, this law, although enacted directly by the sovereign people, and despite the wonderful results just narrated, was so inimical to the interests of the partisan politicians of all parties that it developed great opposition, which resulted in its repeal, in 1915, by the legislature, and the enactment of a new and reactionary law approved by Governor Carlson, which abolished the existing organization and all eligible lists and provided for a new commission whose three members should be appointed by the governor for terms coincident with his own, for the certification of three names instead of the one highest on the eligible lists, and omitted all penalties on auditing and disbursing offices for paying salaries without the certification of the commission, and, finally and most important, it omitted from the classified service those political plums, the chiefs of the state departments and the employees of the legislature, and repealed the continuing minimum appropriation which had enabled so much good work to be accomplished. These changes made the administration of the law absolutely subservient to the governor-and all the professional politicians in the general assembly-for manipulation for partisan purposes, instead of responsive to the expressed demand of the people of the state for greater efficiency and economy in the administration of public affairs. The situation thus created led to another appeal, directly to the people of Colorado, at the general election of November, 1918, when an initiated amendment to the state constitution was triumphantly adopted by the largest majority