I have the highest respect for the pedagogues of Burlington House. I think highly of Ollendorff and I believe Colenso’s Arithmetic a great institution. I venerate the men who invent the impossible questions; but I own I have the humblest opinion of those who answer them. I’d as soon take a circus-horse, trained to fire a pistol and sit down like a dog, to carry me across a stiff country, as I’d select one of these fellows for an employ which required energy, activity, or ready-wittedness. There is no such inefficiency as self-sufficiency; and this is the very quality instilled by the whole system. Ask the veterans of the Admiralty, the War Office, the Board of Trade, and the Customs, and you will get but the same report, that for thorough incompetency and inordinate conceit there is nothing like the prize candidate of a Civil Service examination. Take my word for it, you could not find a worse pointer than the poodle which would pick you out all the letters of the alphabet.
What I should therefore suggest is, to introduce into the Civil Service something analogous to this clinical examination; something that might test the practical fitness of the candidate, and show, not whether the man has been well prepared by a “grinder,” but whether he be a heaven-born tide-waiter, one of Nature’s own gaugers or vice-consuls.
I know it is not easy to do this in all cases. There are employments, too, wherein it is not called for. Mere clerkship, for instance, is an occupation of such uniformity that a man is just like a sewing-machine, and where, the work being adjusted to him, he performs it as a matter of routine. There are, however, stations which are more or less provocative of tact and ready-wittedness, and which require those qualities which schoolmasters cannot give nor Civil Service examiners take away; such as tact, promptitude, quickness in emergency, good-natured ease, patience, and pluck above all. These, I say, are great gifts, and it would be well if we knew how to find them. Let us take, by way of illustration, the Messenger Service. These Foreign Office Mercuries, who travel the whole globe at a pace only short of the telegraph, are wonderful fellows, and must of necessity be very variously endowed. What capital sleepers, and yet how easily awakened! What a deal of bumping must their heads be equal to! What an indifference must they be endowed with to bad roads and bad dinners, bad servants and bad smells! How patient they must be here—how peremptory there! How they must train their stomach to long fastings, and their skins to little soap! What can Civil Service examination discover of all or any of these aptitudes? Is it written in Ollendorf, think you, how many hours a man can sit in a caleche? Will decimal fractions support his back or strengthen his lumbar vertebrae? What system of inquiry will declare whether the weary traveller will not oversleep himself, or smash the head of his postilion for not awaking him at a frontier? How will you test readiness, endurance, politeness, familiarity with ‘Bradshaw’ and Continental moneys?
I think I have hit on a plan for this, suggested to me, I frankly own, by analogy with the clinical system. I would lay out the Green Park—it is convenient to Downing Street, and well suited to the purpose—as a map of Europe, marking out the boundaries of each country, and stationing posts to represent capital cities. At certain frontiers I would station representatives of the different nations as distinctly marked as I could procure them: that is to say, I’d have a very polite Frenchman, a very rude and insolent Prussian, a sulky Belgian, a roguish Italian, and an extremely dirty Russian. Leicester Square could supply all. It being all duly prepared, I’d start my candidate, with a heavy bag filled with its usual contents of, let us say, a large box of cigars, a set of fire-irons, twenty pots of preserved meats, a case of stuffed birds, four cricket-balls, and a photograph machine, some blue-books, and a dozen of blacking. I’d start him with this, saying simply, “Vienna, calling at Stuttgart and Turin;” not a word more; and then I’d watch my man—how he’d cross the Channel—how he’d cajole Moossoo—and whether he’d make straight for the Rhine or get entangled in Belgian railroads. I’d soon see how he dealt with the embarrassments of the roads and relished the bad diet; and not alone would I test him by hardships and hunger, fatigue and occasional upsets; but I’d try his powers of self-resistance by surrounding him with dissolute young attachés given to blind hookey and lansquenet. I’d have him invited to ravishing orgies, and tempted in as many ways as St Anthony; and all these after long privations. Then, I’d have him kept waiting either under a blazing sun or a deep snow, or both alternately, to test his cerebral organisation; and I’d try him with impure drinking water and damp sheets; and, last of all, on his return, I’d make him pass his accounts before some old monster of official savagery, who would repeatedly impugn his honesty, call out for vouchers, and d—n his eyes. The man “who came out strong” after all these difficulties I would accept as fully equal to his responsibilities, for it would not be alone in intellectuals he had been tested: the man’s temper, his patience, his powers of endurance, his physical strength, his resources in emergency, his readiness to meet difficulty, and, last of all, his self-devotion in matters of official discipline, enabling him to combine with all the noble qualities of a man the submissive attractions of a spaniel.
“Are you sure,” asks some one, “that all these graces and accomplishments can be had for £500 per annum?” Not a doubt of it. It is a cheap age we live in; and if you wanted a shipload of clever fellows for a new colony, I’d engage to supply you on easier terms than with the same number of gardeners or strong-boned housemaids.
Last of all, this scheme might be made no small attraction in this economical era—what is called self-supporting; for the public might be admitted to paid seats, whence they could learn European geography by a new and easy method. “Families admitted at a reduced rate—Schools and Seminaries half-price.”
OF SOME OLD DOGS IN OFFICE.
Whenever the Budget comes on for discussion there are some three or four speakers, of whom Mr Williams of Lambeth is sure to be one, ready to suggest certain obvious economies by the suppression of some foreign missions, such as Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, &c. They have not, it is true, anything forcible or pungent to say on the subject; but as they say the same thing every year, the chances are that, on the drip-drip principle, they will at last succeed either in abolishing these appointments, or reducing the salaries of those who hold them.
Ministers of course defend them, and Opposition leaders, who hope one day to be Ministers, will also blandly say a word or two in their favour. For my own part, I don’t think the country cares much about the matter, or interests itself more deeply who drones away life at Hanover than who occupies an apartment at Hampton Court. In each case it is a sort of dowager asylum, where antiquated respectability may rest and be thankful.