ice act of 1911 unconstitutional on account of the failure of the journal of either house to show that the conference committee amendments to one of its sections had ever been printed.29 The county commission, however, held that the previous county civil service law was not affected by the supreme court's decision. In 1914, all three of the leading political parties in the state pledged themselves in their platforms to comprehensive civil service legislation for Cook county. A vigorous effort to get such legislation through the session of 1915 was made but failed. The need for such legislation has long been felt. "For years,' ," it has been said, "the county Civil Service Commission was a sorry joke, a byword and reproach

it became a menace to merit and an engine of unscrupulous politics under a deceptive mask. The law was manipulated at the bidding of tyrannical bosses and cynical spoilsmen." The weakness of the county civil service system seems to have been due in part to the indifference of public opinion and in part to the power of political executives to appoint and remove the commissioners for partisan reasons. In order to take the commissioners out of politics, it has been suggested that they should be chosen by the same standard of fitness which they later apply to other applicants for public office. A bill suggested for enactment by the fiftieth general assembly provides that the commissioners can be removed only after fair trials by two circuit judges and the county judge.30 The existence of three separate and distinct civil service commissioners in Cook county-county, city, and park-appears to be an unnecessary and cumbrous duplication of machinery; and it has been suggested that they might well be consolidated into one commission.31

As noted above, an attempt was made to place the civil service commissions in cities adopting the act of 1903 under some sort of superior control by providing that an appeal 29 McAuliffe v. O'Connell, 258 Illinois, 186.

30 Chicago Record-Herald, February 27, 1913; Chicago Herald, November 21, 1916, January 6, 1917.

31 Report of the Efficiency and Economy Committee, 937

might be taken from the orders of the commission to the circuit court of the county in which the city is located, but this provision was declared unconstitutional by the supreme court of the state. The result of this decision is that the city commissioners are left without any superior state control. The same is true of city commissions operating under the act of 1895. In order to remedy this condition, the city commissions might be placed under the administrative supervision of the state civil service commission. There would seem, however, to be no good reason why the state commission might not be charged directly with the administration of the law in the city service of any city electing to come under the state commission. This would avoid some of the expense, cumbrousness, and duplication of machinery of the present system.32

Under the present civil service system for cities and counties, the commissions are appointed by the mayor and the president of the county board respectively, and the city commission is also removable by the mayor at his discretion. The result is that, as has already been noted, if the mayor or president of the county board is a politician of the spoilsman type, the civil service commission may be so subject to political influences that the object of the law is almost entirely defeated. Some improvement might be brought about by eliminating the requirement that not more than two of the three members of the commission shall belong to the same political party. The members of the board should be selected for fitness irrespective of party affiliations, and the responsibility for the selection and for the work of the commission should rest squarely on the party in power. In the last analysis, however, it is not so much the machinery as the men in charge and the spirit actuating them which determines the manner in which the merit system is administered.

32 This is similar to the New Jersey plan. A bill permitting cities to adopt the law in force in Chicago, but containing the provision that the state commission should have the work of enforcing the law was introduced in the forty-fifth general assembly by Senator Logan Hay. See Report of the State Civil Service Commission, 1906-1907, p. 16; Report of the Efficiency and Economy Committee,

937.

TH

XIV. THE STATE LEGISLATURE

HE legislature of Illinois, known officially as the general assembly, and composed of two branches, the senate and the house of representatives, is, in spite of the restrictions under which it operates, the most important and powerful organ of the state government. The senate is composed of fifty-one members, while the house of representatives is exactly three times as large. This fact points to the greater dignity and importance of the position of senator as compared with that of representative. This inference is further borne out by the difference in the length of terms, senators serving four-year terms and representatives, two years. Since only one regular session is held in each biennium, a representative, elected for the first time, has but little opportunity of learning the business and methods of legislation before it is necessary for him to start his campaign for reëlection, if he wishes to continue in the position, while on the other hand, a senator has a greater opportunity of acquiring experience in legislative methods and procedure. In each regular session of the general assembly, at least half of the senators are "hold-over" members, having served in the preceding regular session, while, on the other hand, it is at least possible that every member of the lower house may never before have served in the general assembly. This, however, is never actually the case as a certain number of members of the lower house are in practice always reëlected. Nevertheless, the necessity of biennial elections in the case of house members may mean that they are more in harmony with the latest trend of public opinion than are the hold-over senators. Another difference between the members of the two houses is the requirement for eligibility that a senator must be at least twenty-five years of age, while a representative need