ment. The complaint is, that in positions where there is room for the display of superior merit, the deserving officer cannot rely on the force of his merit to elevate him to higher posts where his qualifications would be available; and the proposal has its special application to promotion among the more intellectual order of workers, when mental work has been better divided from mechanical than it is at present. The objection that the posts giving scope to a higher order of mind, will no longer be held out as a prize to mediocre merit, and thereby deprive it of an encouragement, can only be listened to in circles where official life is treated as something removed from the ordinary logic of human association. Sir James Stephen, indeed, carries his tender regard for mediocrity to an almost laughable extent, and seems to think that the habit of providing for mediocre men, at the public expense, whether as clergymen or as government clerks, results from a legitimate tendency of human nature, which it would be oppressive to counteract.

Thirdly, as to conferring the prizes of the Service within the Service. Our space will not allow us to recapitulate the opinions expressed in favour of this principle. Its application is absolutely necessary, if anything like ambition is to be attracted into the offices. The extreme difficulty of holding cut adequate inducements to aspiring talent will be appreciated after the perusal of certain facts, communicated by Mr. Hawes.

"I take for illustration the pay on first admission, and the probable salary thereafter of a clerk in this office, who has won his own prom ion by ability and zeal, and not seniority, and which has bee not rapid as vacancies have permitted.

"A. B. entered the War Office in 1807, at £90 a year; was promoted to the second class at £300 in 1822; was promoted to the first class at £500 a year in 1836, after twenty-nine years' service; and, unless appointed chief examiner or chief clerk in the interval, could not attain the maximum salary of £800 until after forty-four years' service.

"C. D. entered in 1820 in the fourth class; promoted to the third class at £200 in 1828; promoted to the second class at £300 in 1840; promoted to the first class at £500 in 1853, having then served thirty-three years; the maximum of £800 cannot be obtained until after forty-eight years' service, unless appointed chief examiner or chief clerk.

"E. F. entered in 1833; promoted to the second class at £300 in 1845; promoted to the first class at £500 in 1853, after twenty years' service; will obtain the maximum of £800 after thirty-seven years' service.'

If there is one thing made clear by the papers, it is that at present there are absolutely no inducements of the kind. But, further than this, all the critics of the changes proposed seem to agree not only that the service is not, but that from its very nature it cannot be made, attractive to the more ambitious and stirring order of young men. A vast proportion of the clerks are employed merely in preparing or auditing accounts. Ambition is out of the question here. But even the more intellectual labour to which we are now particularly referring, consists in providing materials for the judgment of others. The deciding heads must be the changing parliamentary chiefs. The whole system of the British constitution demands this. If they had not the responsibility and the consequent public credit of all measures, we should exchange a parliamentary for a bureaucratic government. It is of the very essence of English political life, that government offices should not be the field for the ambition of Englishmen. For those who are satisfied with private influence alone, there is doubtless no inconsiderable opportunity in the chief appointments. Those who the deciding party, will necessarily exercise large influence over the decisions, especially when the latter is a changing officer, relying on the permanent depositaries of official tradition, and the persons who have participated in the inception of matters which only come before him in their later stages. But this influence is calculated to be the reward of patient duty, not the prize of youthful ambition. To wield it aright demands judgment and experience, rather than the glowing aspiration, and keen intuition, and vivid and sensitive apprehension of genius. The following account of the duties. of clerks of the highest order, is taken from the Report on the Colonial Office, before referred to, and deserves the most attentive consideration:

"cram

"When the letters of the day have been registered, they are delivered to the senior clerk of the department to which they respectively belong, who minutes them with those prominent points which his experience and constant reference to the general correspondence suggest, and proposes, in ordinary cases, the form of the answer, or the practical course of dealing with the subject; and when the correspondence, having been prolonged or complicated, requires an explanation or analysis, he forwards with the papers such a statement of facts, prepared either by himself or under his supervision, as may assist the practical consideration of the question. The papers are then sent either to the Assistant UnderSecretary, or to the permanent Under-Secretary, according to the nature of the subjects, each of whom passes them to the parliamentary Under-Secretary with his observations upon them, and

from him they reach the Secretary of State, who records his decision upon them, after he has considered all that has been submitted to him, and called for such further information as he may require. After that, the papers are returned through the same channel to the Senior Clerk, and it then becomes his duty to examine carefully the minutes and drafts, in order to see whether any point in the instructions may be at variance with facts, regulations, or precedents not known to the Secretary of State or UnderSecretaries; and to execute all the final instructions he may receive, by preparing the drafts, or causing them to be prepared by his assistants, and superintending the copying and dispatch of the letters to be written from them. The usual practice is for the senior to pass on to his assistant those papers which require ordinary drafts, or drafts closely following the minutes, reserving to himself such as involve any question of doubt, or on which no very precise instructions have been given. Drafts are also frequently prepared by the permanent Under-Secretary and Assistant UnderSecretary, in cases which they consider to require it. All drafts finally receive the sanction of the parliamentary Under-Secretary and of the Secretary of State.

"The Précis Writer is chiefly employed in examining and preparing for the decision of the Secretary of State masses of papers on particular subjects which require for their proper elucidation more time than can be bestowed upon them by the clerks who are charged with the execution of the current business."

The subordinate official must be a man of detail. He may be much more, but his primary duty is the collection, verification, and classification of facts. He should be able to draw sound inferences, "putting consequent rightly upon antecedent;" but the power of striking out brilliant ideas would be supererogatory. If the chiefs cannot do this, they ought not to be chiefs; and if Parliament ceases to yield competent chiefs, the constitution must be modified, and mere official reforms will not touch the mischief. Still the labourer is worthy of his hire. The merit required is high, and is entitled to its appropriate reward. If the service does not afford the qualities of Under-Secretaries and Précis Writers, they must be supplied from without, and the general rule must have its exceptions; but we cannot doubt what the general rule ought to be.

We arrive at the result, that the obvious and undoubted reform needed to supply the acknowledged deficiencies of the higher branches of the service, is to separate them from the lower, to promote by merit, and to open the highest posts to merit; thereby attracting real talent, and making it available when obtained. The great mass of officers, appointed for the qualities of mere clerks, must be satisfied with clerks' rewards,

and the promotion of talent must not be made so slow as to exclude the competition of talent, by intermixing the higher classes with the lower, and then deadening all hope and paralyzing all exertion by the mechanism of seniority.

We are now in a better position to deal with the great examination question. Most readers of the Report gather the case made by the Reporters to be that the service is in a disgraceful state at present; that it requires the highest and most aspiring talents, and could offer to them an appropriate field and appropriate rewards; and that we have only to throw it open to the competitors in a literary and scientific examination of the highest class, to fill the Offices with the very first men from the three English Universities. This is strongly stated, but we, like others, think that something of the sort was floating in the writers' minds. Any such case as this we apprehend to have distinctly failed. Neither the proposed ideal, nor the actual short-coming, seems to be stated with due reference to facts. More sober and more qualified views seem alone admissible. Is a competing examination the best mode open to us of obtaining the class of services really required in the higher branches?

There is no more fruitful source of delusion, than the confusion which often takes place between the different kinds of examination, and the papers before us require to be considered with a constant reference to this variety. When Mr. Chadwick, for instance, advocates examinations, he is speaking either of examinations intended to exclude deficiency, or of those which take place in a school or college to test the proficiency of the instructed in the subjects of instruction. The latter kind may generally be conducted with satisfactory results, and have not much to do with the general question. The field is known, the general average of presumable acquirement is known, and special proficiency can be ascertained and classified with peculiar ease. This kind we pass over.

Examinations to exclude deficiency, ("pass" or "standard examinations,) involve greater difficulty. When of a literary character, there is no class which is less satisfactory. There is peculiar risk in forming the opinion, that a man's general education, assumed to be but moderate, is also sound, from an examination alone. If the subjects are few, limited, and announced beforehand, actual "cram," practised by the superficial and unscrupulous, with a view to hold so much knowledge for the nonce, and forget it when it has earned its marks, or that more conscientious but often unprofitable training, which better or slower men undergo in mastering the mere books prescribed, is sure to be at work; it is scarcely possible for

examiners, who have only to pronounce on unfitness, to reject candidates of these classes; and besides this, all kindly examiners instinctively shrink from "plucking," and thereby performing an act which is looked on, not as the refusal of a distinction, but the infliction of a disgrace. If, on the other hand, the questions are numerous, and the subjects not foreknown, far too much scope is given to mere readiness and superficiality, and the undesirable power, often possessed to a high degree by unsound men, of making a great and imposing show of accomplishment out of a slender stock of real knowledge; and there is an undue strain on the examiners' penetration and knowledge of human nature. Academical persons are apt to be misled in recommending the adoption of these examinations outside the walls of universities, by their tolerable success within them. They forget that when it is ascertained that certain questions have been answered by the member of a college, the presumption is, that the knowledge has been acquired in a particular course of training, and that the degree conferred testifies, not only to the result of the examination, but to the two facts, that the graduate has been trained in a particular way, and has also done certain work in the theatre. On the English system, moreover, the possession of a degree implies, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that the holder has passed his time, from fourteen to twenty-two, or thereabouts, under all the influences considered most favourable to education, and has been devoted by his parents to a liberal sphere. The fact, that University degrees generally imply good education, and that they are conferred after examination, has wholly misled many clever, unacademical persons. Mr. Rowland Hill, in particular, has lately exerted himself to obtain the admission of candidates not educated in colleges to the degree examinations in the University of London. An idea prevails, that the examination must be everything or nothing. In fact, it is but part of a system. It is something held up to give definiteness and object to study; and college authorities take care (or ought to do so) that the natural, and obvious, and matter-of-course way of preparing for the degree is, by conformity to the general rules and methods of the college. The degree warrants much that is wholly collateral to the examination. In few words, it tells us, that a man assumes to belong to the educated class, and has not been self-educated, but, on the contrary, has used the highest known aids to education.

The kind of practical examination to which we have before adverted, including examinations in science, would, we believe, be more efficacious. We believe that it might be so con