near the 1914 normal, and our salaries in the Consular Service were generally regarded as inadequate in 1914, before the war began.

Now, we have gone on to a very much higher scale of living, a more expensive scale of living. The temptations in the way of officers are several times as great as they were in 1914, because we have great banking concerns extending their banking facilities all over the world; we have great corporations engaging in foreign trade, or establishing business in foreign countries, and the Consular Service is one of the few places where men with a knowledge of foreign languages and foreign experience are to be found; and with salaries considerably below the standard of 1914 in purchasing capacity, and the demands multiplied many times for men of that character, we will be exceedingly lucky if we retain the men that we have.

Mr. DICKINSON. Does not the department appreciate that practically all of those arguments apply to nearly every class of salaried men that you can name in existence at the present time?

Mr. CARR. Yes, sir; the department appreciates that; but the men of the Consular Service are men who have had a special training and experience, and that experience ought to be utilized for the general public for the small sporter as well as the large one-and men ought not to be tempted away from the service of the public into the exclusive service of a few large corporations, perhaps, when a small amount of money which would enable them to live, plus the attractiveness of the consular profession, will hold them."

Mr. DICKINSON. You would not want to be understood as implying here that the large majority of those well-qualified men particularly adapted to that foreign service are in the Consular Service, would you?

Mr. CARR. A large majority of them?

Mr. DICKINSON. Yes.

Mr. CARR. I do not know of any particular organization which brings together such a large number of men with the kind of qualifications which the great corporations in this country engaged in international trade want at this time.

Mr. DICKINSON. Many institutions have courses in foreign banking, where practically these same qualifications are required for graduation, have they not?

Mr. CARR. That is perfectly true; but the qualities which consular officers possess are not acquired in a school of foreign banking. Mr. MASON. They come from experience; is that the idea?

Mr. CARR. They are qualifications derived from experience, plus acquaintance and contacts with men and conditions abroad; and you can not acquire those in a school of foreign banking or foreign trade. Those are the qualities, by the way, that great business corporations pay large salaries for. For instance, I have one man in the Consular Service who gets a salary of $5,000 a year, and he at the present time has offers from three of the great financial organizations in New York-standing offers-of $18,000 a year and expenses. He is an unmarried man who likes our service; he so far has not yielded to the temptation.

Mr. SMITH of Illinois. The same man without the experience in the consular service would not be worth $18,000, would he?

Mr. CARR. The same man without the experience in the Consular Service might have some difficulty in getting $5,000.

Mr. SMITH of Illinois. Yes.

Mr. CARR. He would not get $5,000 starting where he did when he first began with us.

The CHAIRMAN. Are there any further questions?

CONSULAR ASSISTANTS.

Mr. ROGERS. Are those 40 consular assistants all American citizens?

Mr. CARR. Yes; and they are a very useful body of men; some of them have grown up into as useful and capable men as we have in the service. This particular corps appeals to a younger body of men than the position of vice consul or consul; a young man who would be suitable for consular assistant would be a young man right out of college, say, without much experience elsewhere; occasionally that is different; but that applies to the general run of them. And I think the corps ought to continue, and especially if Congress should consider seriously later on some such provision as that embraced in the bill introduced by Mr. Rogers for the reform of the service and the appointment of consular pupils, in which case this provision, and that of consular pupils, might be coordinated in some respect. Mr. ROGERS. Are these men appointed after examination?

Mr. CARR. All career men in the service, including consular assistants, are appointed after examination, the nature of the examination being published in a pamphlet, copies of which I can furnish the committee, giving all the details.

Mr. SMITH of Illinois. Is it purely a civil-service examination? Mr. CARR. It is purely a civil-service examination, in a sense, with one very important difference: That ordinarily we view the civilservice examination from the standpoint of regarding it as a written examination. The consular-service examination is entirely different from that. One part of the test consists of a written examination, covering the subjects of modern languages-one modern language, at least modern history; consitutional history and government of the United States; political economy; arithmetic; commercial geography; and commerce and resources of the United States, with reference to export trade; international law, maritime law and commercial lawthe elements of those subjects. That usually requires a couple of days before the examining board in answering the written questions.

Then each candidate is brought personally before the board of examiners and is looked over and quizzed on his education, his experience, and his interests; the board endeavors to determine what sort of a personality he has-what his personal appearance is; the sort of man he is; his alertness and other personal qualities; what sort of experience he has had; and what kind of business ability he may possess, so far as that can be determined by a personal examination of that sort. That oral examination is very much the kind of thing which the head of any business house would make in looking over a prospective employee.

Mr. NEWTON. Who constitutes that board, Mr. Carr?

Mr. CARR. The consular board is made up of the Third Assistant Secretary of State, the Director of the Consular Service; the chief

of the Consular Bureau, and the chief examiner of the Civil Service Commission, or his representative.

Mr. NEWTON. How much credit do you give for the written examination, and how much for the oral one?

Mr. CARR. We take an average of the two; we add the results of the two examinations and divide that by two. Then the names are put on the eligible list in the order of their passing mark, and they are drawn from the eligible list in the order of their standing on the list.

Mr. NEWTON. And the promotions in the consular service, clear up to the grade of consul general-are they made through a merit system, or can a man be appointed consul general without any previous experience?

Mr. CARR. All men must enter the consular service in the lower grades. Vice consuls enter, according to the rules, in the $2,500 grade, getting their promotion on merit to $2,750, and then to $3,000; and they are then eligible to promotion to a $3,500 consulship. Full consuls enter in the grades of $3,000 or $3,500, and must win their promotions on the basis of merit to a higher grade. The whole basis of promotion is that of merit, and not of seniority; it is a selective system, in other words, and seniority, so far as we are able to work it out, counts only when the merits are relatively equal. Mr. NEWTON. And then promotions to consul general come only from the consuls, do they?

Mr. CARR. Only from the consuls. The whole theory of it is that a man should enter at the bottom and win his way to the top by meritorious service, and not by other considerations; and that has been carried out in a very accurate and satisfactory way.

Mr. NEWTON. How are promotions made as to ministers and other members of the diplomatic force?

Mr. CARR. The secretaries in the Diplomatic Service are promoted in practically the same manner as consuls are promoted, up to the grade of secretary at $3,000, or counsellor. But there is no regular mode of promoting secretaries from the grade of counsellor to the grade of minister; occasionally that is done, but unfortunately, not very often.

Mr. NEWTON. So that most of the ambassadors and ministers are taken from other walks of life? There are no promotions up to those grades?

Mr. CARR. That is correct. I would like to express the personal opinion and I think I may say it for the department as well—that there will never be a satisfactory solution of the problem of secretaries in the Diplomatic Service until there is a definite recognition of the principle of promotion of secretaries to the grade of minister. Otherwise, you will never get in the grade of secretary the kind of men that we ought to attract to the Diplomatic Service.

There are two things there to be looked after: One is promotion, which is of fundamental importance; the other is salary, which is of very great importance.

We can not possibly build a diplomatic service that will protect the interests of the country so long as we pay salaries of $1,500 to $3,000, and offer no promotion above $3,000; it can not be done.

POST ALLOWANCE.

Mr. ROGERS. Now, let us proceed to the post allowance item. Mr. CARR. The item beginning on page 25, line 3, post allowances, to diplomatic and consular officers, is one in which the Secretary of State recommends an increase from $600,000 to $800,000. Last year, although $800,000 was recommended, only $700,000 was appropriated. One hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars of that went to the Diplomatic Service; $100,000 of it went to the officers in China, to take care of the difference in exchange that we were speaking about this morning; $425,000 of it went to the consular officers.

But this year, since Congress reduced the appropriation from $700,000 to $600,000, we have had to reduce the allotment for the Diplomatic Service from $175,000 to $150,000; we have had to increase the allotment to the officers in China from $100,000 to $160,000; and it leaves only $290,000, instead of $425,000, remaining for the Consular Service.

The situation will be modified to some extent, however, by the rate of exchange now prevailing in Europe, and will cause the basic allowance as made last year to be modified by the more favorable exchange rate prevailing in Europe; but it will still leave us with a general reduction to all of the officers in the Diplomatic and Consular Services, except those officers in China, and there there has been no increase actually; they do not get any more Chinese dollars with which to pay their expenses than they were getting last year, although it costs in gold $60,000 more than it did last year to keep them on the same compensation basis as in 1914, with no allowance for increased cost of commodities.

Mr. ROGERS. You pay them on our standard in their money?

Mr. CARR. We have to pay them on our standard, the standard fixed by Congress, converted into their money; and consequently, where we could do that last year with $100,000, it is estimated that we will not able to do it this year with less than $160,000.

So that there is not the slightest question in my mind that on this item of post allowances turns the whole matter of whether we are going to be able to retain our service, both Diplomatic and Consular-I mean both secretaries and consuls-or not.

I have a number of complaints from various secretaries in the service, one or two of which I should like to read to you, to give you a picture of the situation from the standpoint of the men in the field.

A communication from one of our officers, one of the best men in the Diplomatic Service, a man to whom if you were conducting an international business of magnitude, you would not hesitate to pay $18,000 or $20,000 a year, at least, and whom you would think you were getting very cheaply, is very much in point. His letter has to do with the present situation in which our Diplomatic Service, so far as the secretaries are concerned, finds itself. He says:

It has to do with the present situation in which our Diplomatic Service, as far as the secretaries are concerned, finds itself; it is accentuated by a most irritating and inexplicable phase that has just arisen in the unjustifiable reduction in our post allowances; it is actuated by my desire to set forth the grievances, as I see them, not only of myself but of every single American diplomatic colleague with whom I have spoken; and, in my opinion, it is justified by the fact that unless some assurance and relief is immediately forth

coming, my fond hopes of remaining in a service which I love with all my heart and in which I had hitherto hoped to remain as long as I might be of use to my country must be unfulfilled. I shall, in fact, find myself forced-with many others to relinquish it for some other profession, far less attractive in every way except for the fact that it will afford a living wage on which I can support myself and my family. And I beg you in all sincerity to believe that in this opinion I stand by no means alone.

In Petrograd my post allowance was $3,100; here my post allowance for the first fiscal year was at the rate of $3,000; by the department's instruction of October 11, 1919, it is set for the current year at $2,250. * * * Conservative British official estimates place the expenses of living at 125 to 135 per cent above normal. Surely this is strange recognition of satisfactory service if it be satisfactory-to find one's remuneration decreasing in proportion to one's promotion and the increased expenses which are incumbent thereon! When I accepted this post, which I did with great appreciation and satisfaction, and which I unqualifiedly enjoy from every standpoint-as regards my chief, my colleagues, my work, my clerical support, and the pleasurable social duties—I did so after a fairly close calculation which most decidedly did not contemplate reduction. If the department is able to secure increased clerical appropriation for its use at home, and can increase the salaries of certain employees, why can it not increase at least the remuneration of the diplomatic officers in the field at what it was before? Has anyone at home been laboring under the delusion that because the war is over, the prices have sunk to reasonable levels?

ing apace.

I have reason to believe that I speak also for the majority of my colleagues, ་། ་ ། ་་ btr disapointment and keen resentment is growNone of us advocate sabotage, no one even thinks of a strike, but I think that a large proportion of us see but one inevitable solution. Again! Army officers attached to this embassy in all cases considerably my junior in years if not in experience, receive reasonable remuneration—one of them, some 14 years younger than I, receives $8,000 from his department, while all members of the naval headquarters have received a minimum increase of 20 per cent in remuneration and allowances on account of the increased cost of living. Even the Shipping Board can pay its second in command here more than I rece ve at present.

* *

*

Another secretary stationed at a post of the Continent writes as follows:

On my arrival here the department's instruction of October 11, last, to Minister Hapgood was put before me, and I gather from it that my post allowance will henceforth be at the rate of $1,800 per annum. * * * I have not been in Copenhagen long enough to know whether the cost of living here has officially decreased in the same proportion as this reduction from the $3,600 I drew in Christiania and Bucharest, but I know that in my case so drastic a cut in post allowance, if adhered to, will render necessary my separation from the service within a measurable time. It is now costing me the equivalent of $25 a day to live with my small family in two hotel rooms, with no prospect under present conditions in Copenhagen of obtaining less expensive and more extensive quarters. The discrepancy between my official income on the basis of the new allotment and necessary disbursements would be such as to make it easy to calculate the length of time I should feel justified in allowing it to continue. Coupled with the fact that this is my second transfer since March of this year, I may be entitled to say that I feel rather badly. * * A post allowance of $1,800 is utterly inadequate for my absolute requirements. But all this touches only one aspect of what I have in mind-it illustrates but one phase-and that, perhaps, more negligible than others—of a group of factors responsible for the state of relaxed discouragement and pervasive demoralization which I have noted increasingly of late in the Diplomatic Service. I will not presume to analyze this state of affairs, of which you are doubtless as well aware as any of us. The plain fact is that the service is sick unto the verge of extinction. Then he comments upon the better allowances which are made to Army officers at that particular place.

*

Mr. CONNALLY. Where is he serving?

Mr. CARR. He is serving at Copenhagen. The other man is serving in London. They are, I think, two of the best members of the corps