r
instance, when I was Police Commissioner we appointed some two thousand
policemen at one time. It was utterly impossible for the Commissioners
each to examine personally the six or eight thousand applicants.
Therefore they had to be appointed either on the recommendation of
outsiders or else by written competitive examination. The latter
method--the one we adopted--was infinitely preferable. We held a rigid
physical and moral pass examination, and then, among those who passed,
we held a written competitive examination, requiring only the knowledge
that any good primary common school education would meet--that is, a
test of ordinary intelligence and simple mental training. Occasionally
a man who would have been a good officer failed, and occasionally a man
who turned out to be a bad officer passed; but, as a rule, the men with
intelligence sufficient to enable them to answer the questions were of a
type very distinctly above that of those who failed.

The answers returned to some of the questions gave an illuminating idea
of the intelligence of those answering them. For instance, one of our
questions in a given examination was a request to name five of the New
England States. One competitor, obviously of foreign birth, answered:
"England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cork." His neighbor, who
had probably looked over his shoulder but who had North of Ireland
prejudices, made the same answer except that he substituted Belfast
for Cork. A request for a statement as to the life of Abraham Lincoln
elicited, among other less startling pieces of information, the fact
that many of the applicants thought that he was a general in the Civil
War; several thought that he was President of the Confederate States;
three thought he had been assassinated by Jefferson Davis, one by Thomas
Jefferson, one by Garfield, several by Guiteau, and one by Ballington
Booth--the last representing a memory of the fact that he had been shot
by a man named Booth, to whose surname the writer added the name with
which he was most familiar in connection therewith. A request to name
five of the States that seceded in 1861 received answers that included
almost every State in the Union. It happened to be at the time of the
silver agitation in the West, and the Rocky Mountain States accordingly
figured in a large percentage of the answers. Some of the men thought
that Chicago was on the Pacific Ocean. Others, in answer to a query as
to who was the head of t