alluding; but he does not seem to have thought that there was any necessity for dwelling on it; we mean the circumstance that Cicero, in addition to his oratorical and political abilities, was a great lawyer, and an accomplished man of letters into the bargain. Demosthenes laid out his whole strength upon his speeches; Cicero had a large fund in reserve. And though this would not alter the fact that Demosthenes was the greater orator, it materially affects our judgment in determining their claims to genius. Another point also which Plutarch cites in favour of Demosthenes will be given, we should think, by most modern critics in favour of Cicero. The Athenian had little or no humour; the Roman brimmed over with it. Cicero, indeed, seems on the whole to have had a more complex mind and wider sympathies; but Demosthenes had a simple strength, which we see alike in his speeches and in his actions, unknown to his famous rival. The distinction of his eloquence is its concentrated energy and unswerving relation to the main point. The bearing of every remark upon what is to follow is as clear as in the pages of Macaulay. He was not exactly impassioned; he was too much in earnest. Nothing, he was well aware, could be more forcible than the plain truth about Philip, if the plain truth could be set before the people in a good light. To this end he devoted all his labours; and the result is marvellous. The chiselling of the Philippics and Olynthiacs is perfection. They are terse and luminous at the same time in a measure that has never to our knowledge been equalled. Here it is that Demosthenes stands unrivalled, and a model for the orator of all ages. But Cicero, we think, was his superior in the power of exciting the passions.

As a man, Demosthenes was free from the vanity and ostentation of Cicero, just as Cicero in turn was free from even the suspicion of corruption. What truth there may have been in the story of Harpalus we cannot tell. Plutarch would appear to believe it; but modern scholars have no confidence in Plutarch. The Athenians no doubt believed it; but they must have considered it venial, to judge from their subsequent behaviour. Yet this is the only spot upon the orator's trying career. The story of his cowardice at Charonea in reality amounts to nothing. He ran when others ran, instead of waiting to be speared. That is all which modern investigation has been able to discover in the story. We may, then, dismiss from our minds pretty nearly every thing to his disadvantage which has come down to us from antiquity, and remember him only as the patriotic and sagacious statesman, the failure of whose efforts was not less honourable to him than interesting and suggestive to ourselves.

ART. V.-TESTS FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE.

Report of Select Committee on Civil Service Appointments, with Minutes of Evidence. Parliamentary Papers, 1860.

Annual Reports of Civil Service Commissioners. Parliamentary Papers, 1856-1860.

THE duty of real Liberals and Reformers has altered strangely within the last five-and-twenty years. Formerly, we had to flog the horses: now, we have to put on the drag. It used to be our task to obtain political power for the people: it is our task now to prevent political power from being centred in the populace. Formerly, we had to secure the vast educated middle-class intelligence of the country from being overborne by an oligarchy: now, we have to protect it against being swamped by a democracy. Formerly, we had to strive against undue restriction of the franchise: now, we have to guard against its undue extension. In 1830, again, retrenchment was our duty: in 1860, it is our danger. Then, we had to strive against reckless extravagance: now, we have to strive against reckless parsimony. Then, we had to do battle with villanous and wasteful jobbery: now, we have to do battle with silly and wasteful stinginess. Then, too, we had to argue that war was a folly and a crime: now, we have to remind ourselves that it may sometimes be a solemn and a paramount obligation. Then, we had to denounce a spirit of vicious and busy intermeddling which had so long infested our foreign policy: now, we have to denounce a doctrine of isolation almost as insane, and incomparably more selfish. Finally, and to come to the matter more immediately before us, in 1830 we had to make head against a system of patronage which appointed young men to the Civil Service without any test of character or capacity whatever: in 1860, we have to make head against a scheme which would apply a test at once irrelevant, excessive, and inadequate. Then, we had to reform a plan which filled the junior posts in the Administration with incompetent and gentlemanly dawdlers: now, we have to defeat a scheme which would fill them with unsuitable and discontented prigs. Our work, as friends of freedom, progress, and good government, varies with the varying danger and the growing hour; and our variations become the measure of our true consistency. The tack we go on is different, precisely because the port we steer for is the same. The real steady navigator is not he who keeps his canvas always full, and scuds merrily before the gale, but he who trims his sails and turns his helm according to the shifting

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currents and the veering breeze-who uses the wind as his servant, instead of bending before it as his master.

We are about to say a few words on the subject of "Competitive Examinations" and Civil-Service Appointments; but our readers need not be afraid: we are not going to drag them through the wearisome iterations, irrelevant details, and promiscuous declamation with which discussions on this matter have been usually encumbered. We purpose merely to brush aside all verbose generalities and silly stories which have no pertinence to the question in hand, but are employed to bury it out of sight; and to bring once more into clear light what that question really is, in its simplicity, its integrity, and its magnitude--so that the public may not come to a decision on a false issue, which at present there seems great danger of their doing. We may use Blue-Books, but we shall not quote them; we shall strive to be as distinct as possible, and we can promise to be almost disappointingly brief. In truth, the question, though grave and momentous, and more extensive in its bearings than at first appears, is not complicated, nor exactly difficult. We do not mean to say that the reasons to be given will be overpowering, or the decision obvious and irresistible, or that competent and single-minded judges may not entertain different opinions; but at least, as soon as the real issue is made plain, those who diverge will know precisely the grounds of their divergence, and will diverge only because their objects are distinct, and their principles and temperaments inherently antagonistic-like those of Tories and Democrats, or High-Church and Nonconformists.

We put aside, in the first place and at once, all the loose censure thrown upon the Civil Service Commissioners and Examiners by those who are hostile, as we are, to the Competitive Scheme of Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote. The stories current of their having rejected candidates because they could not work sums which would never in actual life be needed; or because they could not answer questions which no one but a pedant would have asked; or because they spelt words wrong the right spelling of which is still sub iudice, never were worthy of credit, and have been by their recent reports conclusively disposed of. They may occasionally have set tasks which were rather hard, and expected knowledge which was rather recondite, and been more surprised than men of the world need have been at the ignorance they encountered; but we must remember that the qualifications to be required in the candidates were settled with the assistance and concurrence, in every instance, of the Heads of the several Public Departments; that the examinations have been well adapted to test

these qualifications; and that in no instance, we believe, has a candidate been rejected whose examination-papers did not contain errors or deficiencies in the common branches of learning which made it impossible for a conscientious examiner to pass him. Our testimony, after some years of pretty extensive, and not over friendly, observation, is, that the Civil Service Commissioners have done their work in first-rate style, and with a completeness and care that any public department might envy; that we have never caught them tripping; and that they have always been ready with a triumphant refutation of every charge. That they have rejected candidates who would have made, or had made, or did make, excellent public servants is possible enough; indeed, it is indisputable. But it was because the requirements established after long consultation left them no choice in the matter; because the test applied was inherently faulty and inconclusive; or because these candidates never ought, in our judgment, to have been subjected to that test at all. The Commissioners and Examiners have done their duty admirably; we only wish all civil servants did it as well.

We put aside, again, with little ceremony the first memorial of Sir Charles Trevelyan which opened up the question; because its statements were shown by the most experienced chiefs of the several departments to be enormously exaggerated, and because, even where not exaggerated, they had no real bearing on the present issue. We put aside, too, the Report of the Commons Committee of last year; because the constitution of that Committee was partial, because the Report was in the teeth of the evidence, and because the statements it contained were open to the same objection of irrelevancy. We put aside for similar reasons all the anecdotes (some of them piquant enough, it must be confessed) of the shameful or the ludicrous incapacity of many of the clerks appointed under the old régime; the ignorance and idleness of some, the filthiness, the idiocy, the valetudinarianism, and the dishonesty of others,-because these things avowedly apply to a state of affairs long gone by, a state which no one defends, to which no one wishes to recur, and which has already been put an end to by a reform which was introduced almost by acclamation. We put them aside, further, because their reproduction in the present controversy has, to our taste, an ugly flavour of dishonesty. Abuses of

that nature, cogent and conclusive arguments as they were in favour of the improved system which has swept them away for ever, are utterly impertinent and beside the question, when the discussion is whether this improved system shall itself be superseded by an altogether different and very questionable one. Valid enough against unchecked patronage, they are worthless.

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against nominations, which are cancelled unless the nominee can prove his competence. Relevant enough and wholly unanswerable when urged on behalf of a "pass-examination," they are utterly irrelevant and out of place when adduced as pleas for open competition." To bring them forward here, is somewhat impudently to throw dust in public eyes which it is thought possible to blind. None of these reasoners pretend to assert that since the Civil Service examinations were instituted in 1855 any incapable clerk, landing-waiter, or exciseman has been appointed; where, then, is the logic or the fairness of contending for an entire change in the plan and object of those examinations on the ground of scandalously unfit appointments, many of them as ancient as 1835 ?*

We put aside also, on the other hand, all the wild and loose talk, so common in certain circles and in a sotto-voce tone, of the necessity of unlimited power of patronage in a Parliamentary system like ours, for keeping parties together and enabling Ministers to carry on the Government. Arguments of this sort, whatever unacknowledged weight they may have with inconsiderate minds, had better at all events keep silence. They might pass muster once, but they will not bear daylight now. Those who urge them in the present discussion would be ashamed of them, if they ever stated them in clear broad language even to themselves. For if they mean any thing, as applied against an examination test, they mean this: that for the sake of government by party, Ministers must be permitted to appoint civil servants who are incapable of service, to foist upon the public purse men who are not worth their pay, in a word, to rob and injure the country by nominating men to places which they are not competent to fill, and which yet incompetence cannot fill with impunity. They must mean, that is, that the end is to be sacrificed to the means. But, in truth, the argument has not even the miserable validity which, at first sight, might be attributed to it; for under the actual system the right of appointment is vested in the Minister as unreservedly as heretofore, and he can oblige his parliamentary supporters by appointing their friends: if these friends prove incapable of taking up their

We may also notice how irrelevant is the remedy proposed for incapacity in high places by a severe standard for low places. The Quarterly Review well observes: "During the Crimean war every heart burnt with indignation at the incompetence of some of the principal officers [officials ?]. Two or three bad appointments brought Lord Palmerston's last Ministry to the ground. But is this the patronage which competitive examinations are to purge? Not a bit of it. They fly at much lower game. The hawks are annoying them, so they shoot the sparrows. The public cry out that their interests are jeopardised, because important posts are filled by men whose parliamentary interest is their solitary claim; and forthwith our doctrinaires declare the necessity of reforming, at any cost and at any risk, the appointment of the junior clerks."