450 EZEKIEL BROWN ELLIOTT. 



Department, under the present writer. On the accession of Mr. Ed- 

 ward Young to the charge of the Bureau, Mr. Elliott became its 

 chief clerk, although his time continued to be devoted chiefly to the 

 preparation of reports and tables for the use of the Secretary of the 

 Treasury, and to answering special calls for information coming from 

 Congress, where financial questions were resuming the importance 

 they had lost during the periods of war and reconstruction. 



In 1879 Mr. Elliott was appointed as the representative of the 

 Treasury Department upon the commission, under the chairmanship 

 of Mr. George William Curtis, constituted by President Grant to 

 frame rules and regulations to govern the admission of persons into 

 the civil service of the United States. He was chosen Secretary, and 

 occupied that position until the discontinuance of the work of the 

 Commission, which was, in fact, never legally dissolved, but ceased 

 to act through the failure of appropriation on the part of Congress, 

 owing to the hostility of the advocates of the Spoils System. 



During this period Mr. Elliott continued to carry on his actuarial 

 duties in the Treasury Department. On December 1, 1871, he pub- 

 lished a letter on the Credit of the United States Government, with 

 comparative tables, addressed to the Secretary of the Treasury. In 

 1872, at the request of the Superintendent of the Census, he prepared 

 two papers, which are contained in the volume on Vital Statistics of 

 the Ninth Census, as follows : — 



A. On the Table of Births, — correcting manifest incongruities in 

 the distribution, as to age, of the population under five years (pp. 

 517-531, inclusive). 



B. Upon the Statistics of Mortality, — their reduction to the practi- 

 cal form of life tables (pp. x-xv. inclusive). 



In 1879 he was joined with Mr. Thomas L. James, afterwards 

 Postmaster General, in a commission to report upon trials of the 

 electric light in the post-office building of New York City, and to 

 compare the relative economy of illuminating gas and of electricity 

 in lighting. The report of the commission is on file in the Treasury 

 Department. 



In January, 1880, he prepared a series of Tables on the Credit of 

 the United States Government, giving the prices of the several classes 

 of the securities of the United States, together with the corresponding 

 rates of interest realized to investors therein. These tables were 

 published in the letter of the Secretary of the Treasury to the Chair- 

 man of the Finance Committee of the Senate, bearing date January 

 30, 1880. 



