The Press. — London, England, 1858-03-27 00:00:00

as one of the buttresses of Government, nor are the offices for which so many moral qua lifications are required degraded into mere school-prizes. Competition for each office among a number nominated by the patron secures, on the one hand, against. the possi bility of corruption—for the permission to compete is too contingent a gift to corrupt anybody—and, on the other hand, it saves a Minister from the necessity of taking into his office, merely on the ground of intellectual prowess, a candidate whose integrity or busi ness habits he has reason to doubt. The third Report of the Civil Service Com missioners, which has just been issued, re cords the progress and the success of the sys tem. Notwithstanding their firm adherence to the compromise which would seem entirely to exclude the two contending elements, these pages are a curious evidence of the struggle betweex them which is going on within its limits. The lettered dignitaries who have been evoked from their cloisters to perform the ar duous task of raising the scholarship of our pub lie offices, are perpetually trying to cram larger and larger doses of abstruse knowledge into the confused brains of the meek, uncomplain ing candidates, as if to find out the exact point at which " softening" would supervene in the average clerkly organ ; while the practical offi cials, who find that an encyclopaedia know ledge is not to be purchased for a few hun dreds a year, and that these scholarly experi ments create a dangerous panic among can didates, are crying aloud for mercy. Mr. HAT TER humbly suggests that history is not an in dispensable qualification for a coast-guard—a benighted view, at which the Commissioners grumble not a little, and to which they submit with a very ill grace. Lord CLARENDON will excuse the Foreign-office clerks from the ne cessity of being acquainted with French au thors of two hundred years back, so long as they are at ease with the current French of the present day—a suggestion for which he also is somewhat snubbed. Sir DENIS LE AIARCHANT has discovered that clerks in the House of Commons are not less efficient from being ignorant of Greek. The Duke of ARGYLL thinks that a letter carrier will have reached the requisite elevation of scholarship when he can write three or four lines dictated from an easy book, and can do addition and sub traction. We must say that in this controversy our sympathies are with the officials. The Commissioners have published iu their Report bot'a their examination papers, and the marks which on each subject were assigned to each competitor ; and, on their own showing, their ordeal savours far too much of the school and far too little of the office. We find, far instance, an examination for a writership at Ceylon. Here are some of the questions by which the fitness of a candidate is tested for administer ingjustice among villages of rude Cingatese : Trace the influence of the English school on modem French literature, What do you congider to be the chief merits and defects as philosophers of Plato and Aristotle, respectively? The equivalent of aluminium is 13.7. How much per cent. of oxygen, of sulphur, awl of aluminium is containe d in the anhydrous normal (or neutral) sulphate of alumina? Give a description of the most important characteristics Ammon to the trilobites, and give the history of their dis tribution in time. State briefly the argnmenta for and against the opinion that the Homeric poems are the work of one man. It must not be imagined that these guess bons are mere luxuries of pedantry, given to the candidate as a kind of intellectual exerci• tation for the gratification of himself and the examiners. The class of subjects of which these questions form a part were the actual subjects on which the competition was decided. The gentleman who succeeded in classics, in history, and in science, was appointed to the writership, and the gentleman who was far his superior in precis writing, in law, and in poli tical economy—the really practical qualifica tions of an administrator—was rejected. As far as the marks given can indicate intellectual character, the bookworm was preferred to the practical man. We will not, however, specu late invidiously on the successful candidate's merits. We sincerely trust that his familiarity with the anhydrous normal sulphate of alumina v.lll smooth his intercourse with the natives, and his knowledge of the unity of Homer shed a halo over his judicial decisions. But we THE PRESS, MARCH 27,1858. regret to say he by no means stands alone. We find a clerk in the London Docks ap pointed, for his history and geography, over the head of a rival who surpassed him only in the more vulgar acquirements of arithmetic, orthography, and handwriting. Apparently history is of importance in the Docks, for there is another very similar case in the India Docks. But it is scarcely necessary to scrutinize the cases in detail, for the Commissioners admit, with something like exultation, that in about eight per cent. of their appointments they have knowingly and deliberately selected men on account of mere literary acquirements, in pre ference to men whom the examination hat proved to be their superiors in practical quali fications. We do not think that the system will last long, if this mode of handling it is continued. It is the schoolmaster abroad with a vengeance ! One other point brought out in this Report we must allude to, for the benefit of parents and guardians, and that is, the enormous su periority in the results of public compared to those of private education. The Commissioners give a list of the successful and unsuccessful candidates corning from the various schools. From this list it appears that F ton gains a place for about two out of every three of her candidates, Rugby for five out of six, Harrow and Marlborough for about half; whereas the private schools only give 61 out of 136, and private tuition only one out of every three. So important in education is the mutual collision of brains simultaneously undergoing the process. FREEDOM OF PREACH, OR FREEDOM OF SPEECH? " FYE, fye on all tired jades ! on all mad "masters ! and all foul ways ! Was ever man so "beaten? was ever man so raged? was ever " man so weary?" Some of the ecclesiastical helots of the Church of England might borrow the language of Grumio at the present moment. The Archbishop of CANTERBURY has passed his Freedom of Preaching Bill through the House of Lords. By the Commons it will most pro bably be received with little opposition, on account of its " liberal" tendency ; and such being the case, we may shortly expect to find it incorporated with the Constitution. The Bill manifestly has been drafted to meet an excitement, and legalise a novelty. That ex citement may or may not be wholesome. The body sometimes requires stimulants ; so may the mind. That novelty may or may not be judicious. A change of diet or of treatment is sometimes expedient. Perhaps it is the same ' in the case of the Church of England. Whether or not, it is beyond our province to pronounce ; but when a Bill is about to be passed into law which is likely to produce Ia remarkable effect upon the Constitution it is designed to stimulate, or relieve, as the case may be, we cannot help asking ourselves what is the nature of the complaint with which it is to deal? There are thousands of the working clergy in England who, like Grumio, esteem themselves " tired jades," and regard the present move meat as suggested by " mad masters." There are thousands anticipating the arrival in their parishes of travelling pulpits, much as the village children do the advent of a t►•avelling show ; and those hounded clerks who have for years been in full chase after their strag gling flocks, and are run quite out of breath, are ready to exclaim, " Were ever men so " beaten? were ever men so raged? " These men have conscientiously done their duty; and as far as the vulgar cry of " loaves and fishes" is concerned the clergy can afford to exhibit their self-respect by silence, because it is well known that (as a body) from their private resources they bring more income into the ministry of the Church than they receive from it. We are certain that both the Archbishop and Bishop of LONDON believe in their conscientious and painstaking discharge of duty. Nevertheless, while they admire the conscience, they doubt the efficacy. It is pal pable the Primate's Bill is intended to create a more efficacious ministry among the people— particularly in the exists. 291 at present Every one knows how and from whence the Prelates derived their conviction of this re quirement ; for we admit it is a requirement. It was foliowed up by preaching in Exeter-hall ; preaching in the Abbey; preaching on week days ; preaching in courses ; preaching for a week together ; and, filially, preaching in the provinces Several provincial towns, follow ing the metropolitan lead, established Sunday afternoon services, with preaching by all sorts of men on all sorts of subjects. We ourselves saw an immense placard in one town, which ran thus :—" Sunday Services. Subject—The Devil. By the ltev. —." The subject, an awful one, a necessary one—for the pulpit ; but not a fit topic for a placard ! Whether the Archbishop's Bill is pregnant with good or evil will be decided hereafter. Whether itinerant clerks with bands, books, and bibles in a carpet-bag are necessary ; or even, longo intervallo, will bear any remote re semblance to AUGUSTINE, the Apostles, and confessors of the early Church, we need not stop to consider ; but we cannot help saying that the Prelates who have advocated the Freedom of Preaching Bill seem to us to be lacking in wisdom; and that they would have done much better, and acted more in con formity with the character of the Church, if, instead of attempting to provide a cure for a complaint, they had first endeavoured to pre vent the disease In fact, had endeavoured to check the spread of an infection. The truth is, the Archbishop's Bill and the Exeter-hall preachings, and all such measures, are merely efforts to supply the want of efficacy in the Church by an enormous in crease of quantity rather than of quality. We hold it is not more preaching that the Church wants, but better. The reason why people grow weary and go to sleep, or go to the meet ing-house, or go anywhere rather than to church, is that too many of our curates read like schoolboys, and too many of our rectors hum like drones. As the Poet Laureate says, they are the ders of old saws, Distilled from some worm-cankered homily. The people of England have a notion—singu larly mistaken and absurd in the esteem of the Episcopate and the clergy at large—that it is the business of a clergyman to read and preach. Ordination examinations recognise no such obligations. A candidate for erdina tion would risk passing if he made a false quan tity in reading his Greek ; but whether he knows anything about English prosody, proper emphasis, or how to write a sentence gramma tically, have been too much matters of indiffe rence to bishops and their examining chaplains. We believe we may assert without fear of contra diction that there is scarcely at this moment one bishop of the United Churches of England and Ireland who requires to know, or even does know, whether his candidates for ordination can read a chapter in the Bible correctly, can write a sentence of English lucidly, or can utter a syllable with fluency, ease, and proper articulation. The ability of these young men to read dis tinctly and preach profitably are matters on which our bishops are utterly ignorant when they " lay hands" on them, and bind them for life to a profession for which, in hun dreds of cases, they prove themselves in their public acts inefficient. In this way it arises that conscientious parish priests are sad and weary when they look on deserted and empty pews, and hear of crowds of people thronging Exeter-hall and similar places. The want of efficiency in the Church of England lies too much at the door of the Bishops. They have created the disease, and now they attempt to cure it. Never was old proverb more strongly illustrated than in this case—" Prevention is better than cure." _ _ We believe the Archbishop's Bill would have been needless, and Exeter-hall and West minster Abbey services would have been unrequirect, if those simple rudiments of education, to read, to write, to speak, had been properly appreciated. It is not mon ster meetings that the people need. It is not a superabundance in the quantity of the material, but an improvement in the quality The Archbishop might have condensed tha