ll now only on a limited scale. But even on this limited scale no
entirely satisfactory scheme of civil-service administration has
anywhere been worked out. Of late years more and more have the
autocratic powers of public bodies as employers been considerably
clipped, but on the other hand, the ironclad rules which make
change of occupation, whether for promotion or otherwise, necessary
discipline and even deserved dismissal, so difficult to bring about,
have prejudiced the outside community whom they serve against the just
claims of an industrious and faithful body of men and women. And the
very last of these just claims, which either governing bodies or
communities are willing to grant, is liberty to give collective
expression to their common desires.

The question cannot be burked much longer. Every year sees public
bodies, in the United States as everywhere else, entering upon
new fields of activity. In this country, municipal bodies, state
governments, and even the Federal Government, are in this way
perpetually increasing the number of those directly in their
employ. The establishment of the parcel post alone must have added
considerably to the total of the employes in the Postal Department. It
cannot be very many years before some of the leading monopolies,
such as the telegraph and the telephone, will pass over to national
management, with again an enormous increase in the number of employes.
Schools are already under public control, and one city after another
is taking up, if not manufacture or production, at least distribution
as in the case of water, lighting, ice, milk or coal.

This is no theoretical question as to whether governmental bodies,
large and small, local and national, should or should not take over
these additional functions of supplying community demands. The fact
is before us now. They are doing it, and in the main, doing it
successfully. But what they are not doing, what these very employes
are not doing, what organized labor is not doing, what the community
is not doing, is to plan intelligently some proper method of
representation, by which the claims, the wishes and the suggestions of
employes may receive consideration, and through which, on the other
hand, the governing body as board of management, and the public, as
in the long last the real employer, shall also have their respective
fights defined and upheld.

The present position is exactly as if a sovereign power had conquered
a t