Treasury Department, December 15, 1904.

To the Civil Service Commission:

I am in receipt of your letter of the 12th inst. certifying three names eligible for selection as Tobacco Examiner at the port of ————.

I hereby file objections to each and all because of mental unfitness for the position for which they apply.

The Tariff Duty on unmanufactured tobacco is in part as follows:

This is sufficient to show the importance of the position and the necessity of having an expert tobacco man as examiner. No one of these certified is competent. The first is a clerk and stenographer. He has been a letter carrier and is now a clerk in the Customs House at $1,200.00 per annum. He is a professional Civil Service Examination taker, and admits having “crammed” as he terms it for this examination. He has never had anything to do with the tobacco business except that he was once stenographer to a tobacco merchant.

The second is a storekeeper and clerk in the Customs Service. He has had no experience whatever in tobacco except to have seen bales of tobacco while storekeeper for the government.

The third has been a cigar maker but does not pretend to know anything about the tobacco business except a little experience in making cigars from tobacco purchased by others, and that in a very small way. He is in my judgment wholly unprepared to protect the revenues of the government against the frauds continually attempted by unscrupulous importers, who pursue the line of least resistance, and bring their tobacco to the port where deception is least likely to be detected. He is equally unprepared to protect the honest importer from competition with the unscrupulous.

In kindness but in honesty let me say that the man who conducted the examinations has no conception whatever of the qualifications needed in a tobacco examiner.... These applicants may be nice men, and they may wear good clothes, and they may speak good English, and may be men of integrity, but no one of them is fit to hold the very important position to which he aspires, and for the simple reason that he knows nothing at all about the only thing he needs to know anything about, to-wit: Tobacco!

The balance of the correspondence is unimportant in view of the Commission’s statement in its letter of Dec. 9, 1905, quoted page 173, that after three examinations the President on request had excepted one tobacco examiner and the place had been filled independent of examinations.