an honourable desire to bring their own special branch of the Service to the highest possible efficiency, are deserving the gratitude of future generations by earnest and steady exertions in the matter; the most influential portion of the press has distinctly taken it up; and the nation, when it shall have become more enlightened by its prolonged discussion, will assuredly not fail to insist on the complete establishment of an Institution by which the management of its executive affairs will be unerringly committed to the best intelligence of the country. The thing has merely become a question of time: so surely as we now have a uniform penny postage, after various stages of old systems of four-penny, six-penny and shilling rates, so surely will we work our way to a uniform system of strictly impartial and strictly competitive Public Service Examinations, for every branch of the Executive. This will be the case with respect to the British Isles; and, in so far as they are concerned, I might spare myself the labour of writing. But the Union of the Empire, by the extension of such a system of Examinations to the colonies, is a measure of vastly greater moment; and it is one which, if steps are not taken within the next few years to effect it, will, I fear, become impossible of execution: the elements of disunion between the colonies and the mother country will have quietly gained so much strength that union will have become impracticable. The following statement of definitions, principles, and leading regulations is my present contribution to the discussion of the subject:—

§ 1. By the colonies is meant only those whose climate renders them capable of maintaining a population of European descent in undegeneracy of race; and more especially the colonies of British North America, Southern Africa, Australia, Van Dieman's Land, and New Zealand. If we can, by mental agencies, succeed in making these large regions, with their inhabitants present and future, integral portions of one great British Empire,-considering themselves as much such as now do Cornwall and Cumberland, Inverness and Londonderry,-then we shall have little difficulty in holding British India and such small possessions or military stations as Hong-kong, the Mauritius, St. Helena and the Bermudas, against the aggressions of any nation now existing, however powerful such nation may in time become. I say nothing of our

West Indian possessions. To attempt to include them at present, would raise extremely difficult questions connected with difference of race; and I doubt if it will ever be deemed advisable to try to make any tropical region an integral portion of a homogeneous British Empire.

§ 2. The persons who conduct the government and transact the public business of the British Empire (i. e. the whole of its government personel) fall into three great bodies, the Legislative, the Judicial and the Executive, by which latter term is understood collectively all members of the government personel not included in the first two. With the Legislative and Judicial bodies, the proposed Public Service Examinations have nothing whatsoever to do. With all the faults that they have had and may still retain, it is to our Houses of Parliament, our Juries, our Bench and our Bar that England owes her freedom and her greatness, and the present writer would be among the most prompt to join in resisting attempts to introduce organic changes into them. The Bar has begun to improve itself by examinations; and, indirectly, all these Institutions would be benefited by the Executive or Public Service Examinations; both because of the promotion of education and enlightenment generally, and because one chief text-book of the first, or lowest of the Examinations would be a highly paid for prize essay on the general functions of these Institutions, and on the modes in which they operate to preserve the freedom, and promote the greatness of the nation. The effect would be, to attach all the inhabitants of the Empire as much to them as the enlightened portion now is. Magistrates should be included in the Judicial Body; the Police Force, on the other hand, in the Executive Body.

§ 3. The whole Executive Body is capable of several different classifications. One necessary for our present purpose is the threefold division into the Local, the Provincial, and the Imperial Executives.

§ 4. The Local Executive is composed of those persons who conduct and transact the parish, borough and county government and business. It should in the first instance not be made compulsory on the appointing powers, whoever they may be, to appoint only people who had passed one or more of the Public Service Examinations.

Should that hereafter appear to the country to be expedient, it could, of course, easily be done by an act of the Legislature.

§ 5. The Provincial Executive is composed of those persons who transact the executive business of each of the separately legislating provinces of the Empire, viz. the British Isles (or, in some matters, England, Scotland and Ireland separately considered,) Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward's Isle, Newfoundland, Cape Colony, (Capeland,) New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, West Australia, Van Dieman's Land, and New Zealand. The Provincial Executive is that which has, in each of these Provinces, to manage its own general affairs as distinguished from its county and parish affairs, but which has no connection with the affairs of any other province. The Provincial Executive of the British Isles, for instance, consists mainly of the Customs and Inland Revenue Establishments, the Home Office with all the officials appointed by it, and that large portion of the Postal Establishment which attends only to the post offices of the British Isles. The Provincial Executive of the British Isles should in every case be taken from the graduates of the proposed Examinations; and the Provincial Executives of all the other above-named provinces also, unless,-what is very unlikely,-their respective Legislative Bodies objected. The Provincial Executive of each Province should in every case be composed of either children or wards of people permanently settled in it, and be paid from its own revenues.

§ 6. The Imperial Executive is composed of those persons who transact the business not of any one or more provinces, but of the Empire generally. These are mainly the officers of the International Service (i. e. the Diplomatic and Consular, see page 592), and those of the Navy and Army, together with the officials of the Central Imperial Offices which rule the preceding, viz. the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the Ministry of War and the Horse Guards. To the Imperial Executive belong also the Treasury, the Pay Office and Audit Office,-all Offices, in short, which control the salaries and expenses of the other branches of the Imperial Executive. Also the Colonial Office, together with the representatives of the Imperial Sovereign, in all the colonies, i. e. the Governors and one or two of the higher officials; and all the officials of those smaller colonies, which, having no independent

Legislatures, have not the rank of Provinces in the sense here used-where the posts depend altogether on the Colonial Office.

In the following sections, it is the Imperial Executive, as here defined, that is referred to, except where the other executives are expressly mentioned.

§ 7. The Imperial Executive consists of two parts, the Political and the Permanent. The Political, which is and must remain the dominant, is that which changes with every change of Ministry : the Permanent only changes or loses its members from causes connected with those members as individuals. The highest members of the Imperial Permanent Executive are the Permanent Under Secretaries of State in the Foreign and Colonial Offices, and similar Officers in the other great Imperial Offices.

§ 8. All members of the Imperial Permanent Executive are to be taken from the highest graduates of the Public Service Examinations; who will pass the whole series of the Examinations before they are draughted, by lot, into the lowest vacancies of that branch for which they have respectively passed. The only exceptions to this rule will be the naval cadets and junior masters' assistants; for whom there will be a special series of Examinations: it being necessary that those who are destined for a naval life should begin it when very young. Naval surgeons and pursers are, before receiving their first appointments, to go through the full series of Examinations in the same manner as the other members of the Executive; but with the exception of these, it must be understood that the sea-going Naval Executive is not referred to in what follows. All those posts, Civil and Military, of British India which it shall otherwise be deemed proper to reserve for British subjects of European race, to be in like manner filled by the highest graduates of the Public Service Examinations, i.e. these latter to constitute, in so far, the East India Company's Examinations. It will be seen hereafter that the constitution of the Examinations is such that it would be no inconvenience (i. e. in nowise interfere with their chief object) if coloured natives of the East and West Indies were admitted as Competitors, with a view to their filling as many posts in these two territories as might be decided on by the Legislatures. § 9. As the members of the Political Executive are also members of the Legislative or Judicial Bodies, and as it is a part of the plan that it should not interfere with these bodies (§ 2), it follows

their appointment (and that of their private Secretaries) must in nowise be affected by the Examinations. Any officials who may have hitherto been changed with the Ministry, but who belong neither to the Legislative nor the Judicial Body, should cease to be so changed, and should be subjected to all the rules for the Permanent Executive.

§ 10. In the mixed British Constitution there are two great antagonistic elements: the monarchic and the democratic. The monarchic is the element of stability and union: the democratic is the element of change and separation. The Sovereign and the Permanent Executives are the visible representatives of the monarchic element: the people, the House of Commons, and the Ministry are the representatives of the democratic element. (The House of Lords and the Judicial Body side sometimes with the one element, sometimes with the other.) In the Colonial Provinces the elected Legislatures and the Provincial Ministries represent the democratic element. From all this it follows that measures specially intended to ensure the union of the Empire must be effected through the Permanent Executive,-the representative of monarchical stability and unity. To give to prominent members of colonial parliaments high posts in the Imperial Permanent Executive, would be on the one hand a premium on agitation among colonial seekers of places, and on the other a cause of disgust among the inhabitants of the colonial provinces, who would believe their provincial interests betrayed: it would produce disaffection and separation.

§ 11. The essential feature of the plan for securing the lasting union of the British Empire is that the members of each larger branch of the Imperial Permanent Executive are to be selected from all the thirteen provinces specified in § 5, in proportion to the number of their inhabitants, and with the help of Competitive Examinations. Thus, taking the whole population of the British Isles at 28,000,000, that of Canada at 1,200,000, and that of Nova Scotia (with Cape Breton) at 200,000; then, the proportion being as 144: 6: 1, the plan requires that, for every 144 vacancies in the Diplomatic and Consular Services, in the Army, and in the respective Chief Offices in London, filled by natives of the British Isles, there shall be six filled with Canadians and one with a Nova Scotian. And so of the other Colonial Provinces.