The Triumphant Life of Theodore Roosevelt edited by J. Martin Miller

ROOSEVELT THE REFORMER 99
actual fight in which we were engaged, the effect of our hav-
ing made it and the further fact that we were ready to repeat
it on provocation, has put a complete stop to the repetition of
the offense. In the aggregate it is doubtful if one per cent
of all the employees have been dismissed for political reasons.
In other words, where, under the spoils system, a hundred men
would have been turned out, under the civil service law, as
administered under our supervision, ninety-nine men were
kept in."
When President Cleveland in 1893 succeeded President
Harrison, the former invited Mr. Roosevelt to remain in
office, and for two years longer he devoted his time to proving
the practical utility of civil service and the baneful effect of
the spoils system.
THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT
Mr. Riis, in his biography of President Roosevelt, devotes
a chapter to his record on the Civil Service Commission which
he calls "The Fair Play Department," in the course of which
he says:
"I suppose there is scarcely one who knows anything of
Theodore Roosevelt who has not got the fact of his being
once a civil service commissioner fixed in his mind. That was
where the country got its eye upon him; and that, likewise,
was where some good people grew the notion that he was a
scrapper first, last, and all the time, with but little regard for
whom he tackled, so long as he had him. There was some
truth in that; we shall see how much. But as to civil service
reform, I have sometimes wondered how many there were
who knew as little what it really meant as I did until not so
very long ago. How many went about with a more or less
vague notion that it was some kind of a club to knock out
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