请将“a.	Opening up of centralised power of office
When the Duke of York took command of the horse guards in 1796, he informed the field chaplains that they must either perform their office in per-son in future, or they would be pensioned off. All but two of their number accepted the modest pension that was offered. Conclusions can be drawn from this as to the religious guidance of the guards regiments at this date. The fact that in 1807, chaplains serving overseas still received a salary equivalent to that of a major, on the express instruction that they were obliged to serve in person, indicates that things did not change so rapidly.9
At the same time, comparatively large sums (an average of £8,400 per year in 1798-1800, £13,300 in 1813-15) were paid in police salaries. Police services at this time were a kind of tradable good. They were rewarded by the distri-bution of fines, confiscations, and the award of costs, as well as by regular wages.10 Police service was thus a publicly organised private speculation on the proceeds from successful prosecution of law-breakers.11 Successful investi-gation was permitted with no questions asked, even by private contractors.12
When Nassau Senior resigned from his Oxford chair in 1829, Richard What- eley was elected to succeed him. He had no appropriate qualification, but was convinced that as a prominent Christian he would succeed in freeing econom-ics ‘permanently from its bad reputation'. When Whateley was subsequently appointed archbishop of Dublin, Frederick Denison Maurice had himself pro-posed for the chair, arguing that
Political economy is not the foundation of morals and politics, but must have them for its foundation or be worth nothing.
Maurice had still less in the way of pertinent qualification than Whateley, but believed he would soon be able to pick up the details of the subject, even if he was not familiar with its underlying principles. Maurice was rejected, not on the grounds of his deficient professional qualification, rather because of his particular theological interpretation of baptism.13
Examples such as these can be readily multiplied in almost every kind of official position. Typical cases are fictionally depicted in Henry Fielding's novel Amelia, Charles Dickens's impressive portrayal of the judicial system in Bleak House and of the chase after posts in Little Dorrit, as well as Anthony Trollope's satirical chapters on administrative reform in The Three Clerks. They show the continuity - stressed especially by G.E. Aylmer - of a form of gov-ernment in which power of office meant first and foremost a private right and interest in possession, while access to this possession was itself possible only through patronage and payment of a price. There were regular sinecures of all kinds, and a widespread pluralism of offices along with the practice of substitution that went together with this, while for offices that were rewarded chiefly with a salary or fee, the office could be openly practised in the best way to yield income for the office-holder. All these forms outlasted not only the eighteenth century, but even the first decades of the nineteenth. Yet despite all this, from 1688 - or more precisely, from the wars of the 1690s - there was a steady opening up of centralised power of office within estate confines. Access to office was still by way of patronage, but the practice of specific forms of office was gradually controlled more clearly on the basis of Parliament's financial authority and changed ideas within the (estate) public sphere. The most important causes of this development were the financial and organisational requirements of the wars to which the English government committed itself, initially in defence of the Protestant dynasty (against the French government that supported the house of Stuart), later to defend and expand its newly acquired position of international power.
The personnel of the English government (including Justices of the Peace) remained numerically fairly small.14 In the course of the eighteenth century, de facto practices of advance emerged, alongside more or less formalised rules of procedure. Yet it is too early to speak of a regular bureaucracy at this time. What was much rather involved was the development of that mixture - gener-ally characteristic of England/Great Britain - of new and relatively rationally organised institutions along with forms of private exploitation of centralised appropriation that persisted almost unchanged. It was not unusual for this mixture even to be embodied in particular individuals, such as those officials who performed specialised work in a particular department for a regular but low salary, but were able to supplement their income by the simultaneous possession of a further office that they either did not practise at all, or had a substitute perform on their behalf. In his analysis of the formation of a 'fiscal-military' state, John Brewer stresses how in the administrative system of eight-eenth-century Britain, traditional clientelism was integrated into a new kind of institutional loyalty.15 This led to a situation, according to Brewer, in the above-mentioned conflicts over government reform that developed in relation to the American War of Independence, in which not only was the influence of the crown over Parliament successfully limited, but demands were raised from within the administration itself for the restriction of sinecures and pluralism, and for a general rationalisation.16 The prospects of success of such demands remained limited, so long as the path of patronage remained open and no professional civil service developed. Yet the political standpoint that historians (following a contemporary usage) summarise under the notion of 'country', generally de-legitimised the possession character of office power in the course of the eighteenth century.
Public criticism of this kind, which was also expressed in Parliament, was impelled by the fact that both military expansion and the extension of the credit market required a rise in the tax burden by way of security. This meant in the first instance a rise in existing taxes and the introduction of new indirect ones. (The fiscal importance of taxes on landed property, on the other hand, fell.) Both the level and form of taxation had the effect of developing among members of the privileged estates an interest in the control of both expenditure and offices, unless they directly profited from these. This generalised interest - or, to put it differently, the absence of tax privileges for the English nobility - was the most important material basis for the political standpoint that was known as 'country'. This involved a fundamental criticism of all that waste, corruption and 'interestedness' (in the contemporary sense of the term) that made up the 'court' and was ascribed to it. The manifold conditions that were placed on fiscal legislation responded to this developing public opinion within the estates, and thus to the preconditions for the support of the government in the counties. In this way there arose in England a specific dynamic for the rationalisation of centralised power of office. This proceeded less by way of the formation of a professional civil service than by estate appropriation of control of over centralised power of office. Gradually - the tendencies are structurally decisive, but should not be overestimated -, this centralised power became a component of the government apparatus, which could be instrumentalised for estate interests.
A fine example of this process is given by E.P. Thompson. Until 1777, a certain Ruperta Howe managed not only to escape royal control of her office as 'lieutenant of the forest', but in particular the obligation that went with it to supply wood at low cost for the fleet. When she sought however to continue this practice with the justification that she could obtain higher prices for the wood at public auctions, she provoked an investigation of her conduct. The 'land revenue commissioners' established that in the course of the eighteenth century, the crown had failed to derive any profit from forestry, but on the contrary had incurred net costs (for example the payment of wardens). The total costs came to more than £8,000, whilst all the proceeds had been kept by the lieutenants of the time.
The original grant (they noted) is not a grant of the forest, but of an office to which duties are annexed, as well as emoluments, and these duties have been increased. [The lack of any controls had led to a situation in which] the Grantees of Offices, being left so long in the undisturbed possession of the profits of what has been entrusted to their care, are gradually led to look upon the property itself as their own.17
The rationalisation of the royal administration involved a process of expropri-ation which in retrospect is easily undervalued. For the institutionalising of private interest that characterised power of office under the ancien régime was generally de-legitimised, and in some cases legally abolished. Initially this process, however far-reaching, took place within an estate limitation. The final opening up and instrumentalising of centralised power of office only resulted in the course of the nineteenth century. It had three causes in particular.
The first of these was the organised distribution of a critique of the estate character of rule (cf. Section c). This was directed against the restricted right of participation in centralised power, and - what is immediately relevant here - its private exploitation. To describe all the various forms of enrichment and practice in the private interest, the slogan of ‘old corruption' was coined.
This ‘old corruption' has many similarities in content with that of ‘feudal-ism' or the ‘aristocracy' in the French Revolution. These notions all sum-marised what was to be abolished. The so-called ‘black books' that John Wade repeatedly published should not be forgotten (cf. in particular that of 1832). These denounced practically everything: the pluralism of clerical and secular offices, the practice of substitution along with such pure sinecures as the Chief Cupbearer and the Sergeant of the Silver Scullery. Oligarchical town councils, judges with fixed incomes, were all challenged by the standard of the public good. Though the reforms of the 1830s were far from destroying patronage, many sinecures were indeed abolished at this time, while the reform of town councils swept away the old forms of oligarchic urban rule and church reform shook up the practice of pluralism.”翻译为中文