请将“More precisely, in place of the former practice of recruitment, a system was introduced, the effect of which was to both influence and qualify the results of formalised controls of competence. For with the social expansion of strategies of ascent by way of manifest talent, the use of personal connections lost its official legitimacy, but not altogether its effect. Estate hegemony through access to positions in the centralised power was transformed by administrative reforms and public criticism into the de facto preference for alumni of the ‘public schools'. The new system had little to do with equality, but estate rule was now replaced by the inequalities of a class society.
a.1. Structural change in the instruments of public power
The development of the English legal and judicial system does not really lend itself to summary analysis. In connection with the practice of the Justices of the Peace, which was formally one of interpretation but in actual fact one of law-making, at least one example of the transformation of the law will be dis-cussed below (cf. Chapter 4, Section b). I will therefore confine myself in the present discussion to the exemplary significance of developments in the realm of armed force. For long periods of time, this was both the instrument of a power politics pursued increasingly in the interest of capital and - bourgeois - nationalism, and a refuge for the remnants of estate privileges. This latter aspect took different forms in the different branches of organisation.
The navy, which was the foundation of England's supremacy on the high seas, remained typical of the ancien régime. In its mixture of private and ‘public' recruitment, the inadequate organisational and instructional competence of the Admiralty, the award of officer commissions and captaincies on the basis of patronage, the independence of captains and the almost total neglect of the living and working conditions of the sailors, this was a fighting force in which noble naval officers possessed far-reaching disposal over an instrument of royal rule. Reforms that were implemented in practice placed formal limitations on this power of disposal. But how deeply anchored the traditional practices were became clear when in the late eighteenth century one government commission after another struggled in vain with the regulation of naval finance and procurement, the restriction of private patronage over officer and cadet positions, and the need to establish a pension fund to facilitate the retirement of officers no longer capable of service.24
More stubbornly than parliamentary reports, the mutinies that broke out in 1797 in several quite separate places made clear to the lords of the Admiralty the necessity of reform. Certain changes were made; the provision that from 1805 no further officers should be appointed who were not at least fifteen years of age may have been based on soldiers' demands for the removal of incompetent and terrorising officers. But control over the equipping of ships, the engagement of sailors, and the practices of captains and ships' officers, remained limited. Even publicly expressed demands for a reform of the navy had little chance against the political anchorage of the ‘vested interests' of the naval lords.25 At the end of the Napoleonic wars, reform demands of this kind had the wind taken out of their sails, in so far as over a hundred thousand men were discharged from the navy, which was reduced in manpower to a strength of around twenty thousand.26
Just as in other realms of supposedly public power, attempts were made in 1832 and 1866 to restructure the navy by legislative reform. These reforms narrowed the opportunities for private possession and eliminated posts without definite service obligations. Control procedures and an unambiguous structure of command were introduced. In the course of the general criticism of ‘old corruption', admirals were forbidden to award positions to more than two members of the same family. In 1848, the number of cadets taken on was limited to a hundred each year, 72 of whom the Admiralty directly employed.27 But this changed nothing in the way that officer positions were occupied almost exclusively by members of the nobility, or at least by individuals with noble sponsors. It was, finally, the preconditions of military competition and technical development that struck a breach in the estate monopoly on recruitment. From the 1840s, non-noble candidates were sometimes able to rise even without enjoying the patronage of a great lord - in particular by specialising in the less prestigious steamships.
After the sobering experiences of the Crimean War, not only was the attempt made to control personnel policy more strictly, but former officers were also compelled to appoint (thoroughly non-noble) ship's engineers to officer posi-tions and thus recognise them as ‘equals'.28 But the favouring of particular candidates for high position still continued. The Times could still describe the Admiralty at the end of the nineteenth century as ‘a very old and very peculiar corporation',29 and it was only in the course of the First World War that its corporate authority was finally subordinated to decision-makers who had to legitimate themselves politically. Internal changes were then finally under-taken that made the navy a genuine instrument of the public power.
The ‘militia' of the eighteenth century was almost completely a local instru-ment. The dependence of its deployment on the agreement of the local ruling families to the aims in question was a long-established requirement, as was the de facto claim of the most powerful noble families in a county to the lord lieutenancy, which generally went together with command of the militia. Since the militia was financed from agricultural taxation, the idea still prevailed that a fighting force predominantly paid for by the landowners amounted to their corporate property. The nobility distributed officer posts among themselves in accordance with social rank, and liked to parade with swords and ribbons. Many commanders were interested in the training and equipment of their militia regiments, though others were more concerned with appearance, and bothered little if at all with military effectiveness. All of them, however, in Fortescue's words were to some extent petty Sovereigns, with the Militia for their army. They were attached to the force, frequently spent very large sums upon it, and easily grew to regard it as their own. Their officers shared their views, and hence in many cases a regiment of Militia became a very exclusive countryclub, with a just pride in itself. . . .30
This is clearly a question of social arrangements that would not have been pos-sible without the participation of the local population. For, whilst the agricul-tural taxes were indeed paid principally by the well-to-do landed proprietors, the remaining rural population were affected not only by their practice of appropriation, but also by the compulsion to serve in the militia or the obliga-tion to contribute to the maintenance of militia members' families. Many had still much higher financial burdens, in that they had to pay for a substitute, generally a poor devil. The new estate conception of the militia ended the potential for local armed resistance by the nobility against the crown, while it also sharpened local antagonism between the nobility and the lower orders.
In the French revolutionary wars at the end of the eighteenth century, partly on the proposal of militia commanders31 but partly also against their vehement protests,32 militia regiments were integrated into the standing army. In 1808 this renunciation by the nobility of a locally generalised estate possession of armed force was given legislative confirmation in favour of generalised estate interests that transcended local conditions.
The further decline of the militia is unimportant in the present connection. It was bound up with the creation of a regular police force and the requirement of military professionalism, which neither the militia officers nor their 
rank and file could meet - not that they attempted to do so. In the nineteenth century, the ruling estates were no longer politically able to maintain the non-professional leadership of military forces. The militia thus became one of those means of estate rule which the formerly dominant estates of England simply abandoned in the course of time. It persisted in a more restricted form, but rapidly lost its significance for the reproduction of estate rule.
Until 1871, the sale of officer commissions in the English army remained legal. Both entry into a particular regiment and promotion to higher ranks were regularly traded. There were non-tradable positions and non-tradable promotions, official limitations of price and a rule designed to ensure that higher-rank positions coming free were offered on a basis of seniority. The commercial character of officer commissions was especially apparent in the fact that at the end of his active career an officer not only sold his post (to finance his retirement) but also went over to half pay, on which basis he could still obtain further promotions and rise in the military hierarchy. The number of senior officers available for service was considerably reduced in this way.”翻译为中文