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Excerpt from The Survey, Vol. 67: October 1, 1931 Fifty years ago American c1t1es were notorious, not merely for machines and bosses - these we have with us still - but for a pervading inefficiency which left no branch of the service untouched. There was then not a civil service act in existence in the United States. With each change of administration there was a'clean sweep of all, the office holders appointed by the last, and the sole qualification for appointment was party service. Today the rank and file of the municipal service remains unchanged despite the changing fortunes of politics. So complicated and tech nical have many of the services become that the politicians are loath to court administrative disaster by turning out even well-paid technicians. A thousand well-directed shafts can be levelled at the way civil service laws are carried out, but there is manifest today among city servants a spirit very different from that of 1880. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.