But to propose that members of parliament should give up their own patronage was a very different thing from asking them to take away the patronage of the East India Company. Sir Charles Trevelyan, therefore, before publishing his proposal, sent it round to a number of distinguished persons both inside and outside the Government service, and printed their very frank replies in an appendix.
Most of his correspondents thought that the idea was hopelessly impracticable. It seemed like the intrusion into the world of politics of a scheme of cause and effect derived from another universe—as if one should propose to the Stock Exchange that the day's prices should be fixed by prayer and the casting of lots. Lingen, for instance, the permanent head of the Education Office, wrote considering that, as matter of fact, patronage is one element of power, and not by any means an unreal one; considering the long and inestimably valuable habituation of the people of this country to political contests in which the share of office ... reckons among the legitimate prizes of war; considering that socially and in the business of life, as well as in Downing Street, rank and wealth (as a fact, and whether we like it or not) hold the keys of many things, and that our modes of thinking and acting proceed, in a thousand ways, upon this supposition, considering all these things, I should hesitate long before I advised such a revolution of the Civil Service as that proposed by yourself and Sir Stafford Northcote.'[[88]] Sir James Stephen of the Colonial Office put it more bluntly, 'The world we live in is not, I think, half moralised enough for the acceptance of such a scheme of stern morality as this.'[[89]] When, a few years later, competition for commissions in the Indian army was discussed, Queen Victoria (or Prince Albert through her) objected that it reduced the sovereign to a mere signing machine.'[[90]]
In 1870, however, sixteen years after Trevelyan's Report, Gladstone established open competition throughout the English Civil Service, by an Order in Council which was practically uncriticised and unopposed; and the parliamentary government of England in one of its most important functions did in fact reduce itself 'to a mere signing machine.'
The causes of the change in the political atmosphere which made this possible constitute one of the most interesting problems in English history. One cause is obvious. In 1867 Lord Derby's Reform Act had suddenly transferred the ultimate control of the House of Commons from the 'ten pound householders' in the boroughs to the working men. The old 'governing classes' may well have felt that the patronage which they could not much longer retain would be safer in the hands of an independent Civil Service Commission, interpreting, like a blinded figure of Justice, the verdict of Nature, than in those of the dreaded 'caucuses,' which Mr. Schnadhorst was already organising.
But one seems to detect a deeper cause of change than the mere transference of voting power. The fifteen years from the Crimean War to 1870 were in England a period of wide mental activity, during which the conclusions of a few penetrating thinkers like Darwin or Newman were discussed and popularised by a crowd of magazine writers and preachers and poets. The conception was gaining ground that it was upon serious and continued thought and not upon opinion that the power to carry out our purposes, whether in politics or elsewhere, must ultimately depend.
Carlyle in 1850 had asked whether 'democracy once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such-like, will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real,' and had answered, 'Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain those conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot—the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again.'[[91]]
By 1870 Carlyle's lesson was already well started on its course from paradox to platitude. The most important single influence in that course had been the growth of Natural Science. It was, for instance, in 1870 that Huxley's Lay Sermons were collected and published. People who could not in 1850 understand Carlyle's distinction between the Delusive and the Eeal, could not help understanding Huxley's comparison of life and death to a game of chess with an unseen opponent who never makes a mistake.[[92]] And Huxley's impersonal Science seemed a more present aid in the voyage round Cape Horn than Carlyle's personal and impossible Hero.
But the invention of a competitive Civil Service, when it had once been made and adopted, dropped from the region of severe and difficult thought in which it originated, and took its place in our habitual political psychology. We now half-consciously conceive of the Civil Service as an unchanging fact whose good and bad points are to be taken or left as a whole. Open competition has by the same process become a principle, conceived of as applying to those cases to which it has been in fact applied, and to no others. What is therefore for the moment most needed, if we are to think fruitfully on the subject, is that we should in our own minds break up this fact, and return to the world of infinite possible variations. We must think of the expedient of competition itself as varying in a thousand different directions, and shading by imperceptible gradations into other methods of appointment; and of the posts offered for competition as differing each from all the rest, as overlapping those posts for which competition in some form is suitable though it has not yet been tried, and as touching, at the marginal point on their curve, those posts for which competition is unsuitable.
Directly we begin this process one fact becomes obvious. There is no reason why the same system should not be applied to the appointment of the officials of the local as to those of the central government. It is an amazing instance of the intellectual inertia of the English people that we have never seriously considered this point. In America the term Civil Service is applied equally to both groups of offices, and 'Civil Service principles' are understood to cover State and Municipal as well as Federal appointments. The separation of the two systems in our minds may, indeed, be largely due to the mere accident that from historical reasons we call them by different names. As it is, the local authorities are (with the exception that certain qualifications are required for teachers and medical officers) left free to do as they will in making appointments. Perhaps half a dozen Metropolitan and provincial local bodies have adopted timid and limited schemes of open competition. But in all other cases the local civil servants, who are already probably as numerous as those of the central government,[[93]] are appointed under conditions which, if the Government chose to create a Commission of Inquiry, would probably be found to have reproduced many of the evils that existed in the patronage of the central government before 1855.
It would not, of course, be possible to appoint a separate body of Civil Service Commissioners to hold a separate examination for each locality, and difficulties would arise from the selection of officials by a body responsible only to the central government, and out of touch with the local body which controls, pays, and promotes them when appointed. But similar difficulties have been obviated by American Civil Service Reformers, and a few days' hard thinking would suffice to adapt the system to English local conditions.