Civil Service

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

In the "Yesterday" column of Monday's CRIMSON reference was made to "the spiritual followers of Lord Hewart" and the "writers of angry books on bureaucracy." As John Dickinson, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, once pointed out to some of us, the word, "bureaucracy" has an emotional significance which causes a man of scientific leanings to shun its use in scientific discussion. Nevertheless, there remain grave dangers inherent in a civil service when the methods of selecting its members has been as informal as that of the Administration during the past eleven months. The President has surrounded himself with a new hierarchy of civil servants, starting at the top with the Brain Trust and proceeding on down to the lower classes of civil servants under the banner of the National Recovery Administration, the A.A.A., and others. These extra workers were chosen without aid of any competitive system of examinations. With the ranks of the civil service steadily swelling, it is obvious that some equitable, competitive system of examinations should be set up, or the crys of Lord Hewart's spiritual followers will be more than justified.

In the same column the writer feared that the decision in the Ben Avon Case would not be overruled by the Supreme Court. Aside from the question as to whether it already has been tacitly overruled (see Crowell v. Benson, in which the Court takes a day off in a "lazy, hazy sort of way"), does it not seem obvious that if the Court even attempted to review the findings of fact by administrative tribunals, its docket would be swamped? The Administration has set up all sorts of new administrative tribunals, as well as increasing the work of those previously established, and the decisions of these bodies are already swelling the archives. The Supreme Court will have its hands more than full in reviewing the law in this class of decisions, and will doubtless return to its former rule of accepting administrative tribunals' findings of fact as final. Now, in lieu of this probability are the demands of Lord Hewart, James Beck, et alia, that administrative tribunals be kept under close scrutiny, both as to membership and as to decisions, entirely without merit? Victor H. Kramer '35.