The Sun.
London, England, 1854-03-10 00:00:00

NEW SCHEME FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE.

The new scheme for admitting into the civil service of
the country by a system of open competition, instead of
by private patronage, as heretofore, promises to be one of
the most important reforms proposed in our day. We do
hope that the pressure of our business will not prevent this
scheme from receiving, this session, the attention it merits.
There are a great number of offices connected with the
administration of the country, and ranging from positions
of high trust and emolument, down to clerkships and the
like, moderately paid. It is, above all, desirable that these
offices should be well filled. The prosperity of the country,
it has been well said, depends on our chance of a " re-
formed Downing-street." The new scheme is an attempt
at such a reform. By the present system, which makes
the possibility of obtaining a Government office depend on
acquaintance with a member of Parliament,
,and such like
means of private influence, only a limited number of per-
sons can enter the avenue which leads to public employ-
ment. If your father has been butler to an archbishop,
you may get a Government situation ; hut unless your an-
tecedents have been of that kind, you are excluded. Mem-
bers of Parliament and men in office groan under the ap-
plications made to them by aspirants for employment
in the public service The proposed scheme would relieve
them of this burden, Vacant Government offices of the first
grade, at least, would be advertised for public competition;
all candidates would be admitted, on bringing a formal
certificate of moral respectability ; and the election
would be determined by an examination. The young
man found by the examiners the most fit for a Treasury,
a Home-office, or a Foreign-office clerkship would get it ;
and his further promotion in his department, or his trans-
ferrence from one to another, would be regulated by the
, experience of what he was worth.
A good deal of the advantage of the scheme will depend
on its precise details. To what offices will the admission
be by competition ? Not, of course, to the Premiership
and offices of that kind ; but to offices, we suppose, of the
first grade. In other words, the first admission into the
civil service of the country will be a matter of general com-
petition to all comers ; for promotion, when once in the
service, the selection will be more special. Again, what is
to be the mode of examination of candidates for the lowest
posts ? Much will depend on this. Mere examinations of
the kind in practice at schools and universities will not do.
Examinations must be so arranged as to reveal the compe-
tence of the candidates for the actual business they are to
be engaged in—or, as Bentham used to call it, their
" official aptitude."
Matured in detail with even tolerable'; judgment, the
scheme could not fail to be of great benefit to the common-
wealth. We have heard but one objection to it in princi-
ple—that it would be establishing a bureaucracy. It would
hand us over, it is said, to a system like that prevailing in
Prussia. Now the fact is, whether we adopt such a
scheme or not, we have a bureaucracy. We have at pre-
sent a hierarchy of officials pervading society, and perma-
nent in their places. We need not extend that hierarchy,
but only provide it with the fittest men we can get. Our
official system would undoubtedly be popularised by the
prop .sed change; and perhaps prejudice might be obviated
by some arrangement that would not confine the higher
offices exclusively to persons who had served in the lower,
but would permit, in extraordinary circumstances, impor-
tations into the official body at any stage. The East India
Company did themselves honour, and gained a valuable
servant by offering at once one of the highest posts in the
India House to the late James Mill, after the publication
of his " History of British India" a work begun and
completed as a private undertaking, and severely criticising
the company itself. If the higher appointments had been
confined exclusively to those already in the company's
service, such a man could not have been chosen. Why
should not the Government reserve, under the new scheme
the right of such extraordinary appointments ? The civil
service, in this respect, need not be regulated exactly as
the military and naval services, where the speciality of the
training requires a transit upwards through the Whole
series of ranks.— Glasgow Commonwealth.