The Sun.
London, England, 1869-10-15 00:00:00

LONDON, FRIDAY, OCT. 15, 1869.

Doubts are beginning to increase and multiply as
.0 the wisdom, after all, of that system of Competi-

tive Examinations which was to effect such wonders,
and to ensure such efficiency, throughout we don't
know how many important Government depart-
It has been thought by many from the
very commencement that the system itself, in its
organization, was very much indeed of a sham and of a
mere make-believe. One of the most sagacious of
modern intellects has avowed, since the date when
Competitive Examinations were first instituted, that
out of a dozen questions on one of the printed lists or
papers, there were only two that he himself, though
a skilled mathematician and professor of the sciences,
could have answered off hand, and on the spur
of the moment, supposing he had been put to it.
The questions, in point of fact, according
to that dispassionate witness, are framed un -
fairly with the very design of entrapping the
victim they are placed before into bewilderment. It
has been often said facetiously before now that a new
wing is required to Bedlam in consequence of the ex-
traordinary addition to the number of lunatics caused
by Bradshaw's Guide (so called !) to the Railways.
And only a little more seriously it has for a long
while been insisted upon, by many, in the same
way, that precisely the same necessity will de-
volve upon the next generation in consequence of the
maddening influence of this long be-puffed and be-
praised system of Competitive Examinations. A new
unhappiness and a new solicitude have been thereby
ingeniously added to the discomforts of school-time,
and of youth's first entrance upon the duties and
responsibilities of early manhood. School-days pro-
verbially mark the happiest epoch in life, as a whole,
—among all except schoolboys themselves. Yet
these very days have their griefs and anx.eties, just
as much as any other of the stages of burn tn exist-
ence; The schoolboy's elders had hitherto ignored
them altogether, and systematically, until they
were very considerably magnified and enhanced
by the ins'itution of this wonderful syston of
Competitive Examinations. Ihe strain or tension put
upon the intellectual energies of the mass of youth-
ful competitors in these Examinations we believe to
be anything but wholesome or beneficial—we believe
to be, on the contrary, in the highest degree pre-

men t s.

judicial. With knowledge, moreover, it is, as a
rule, as it is with money —soon won, soon lost.
Those who are in course of training for a Competi-
tive Examination are what is called " crammed" for
some time previously. They swallow a large
mass of raw and undigested, and therefore, to
employ another phrase in the animal economy,
of unassimilated information. It may serve its pur-
pose just for the time being, if the pupil's memory
can, for that time being, remain sufficiently reten-
tive. But, afterwards, the results are just simply nil.
The knowledge so acquired, hurriedly, and all jum-
bled up altogether, is forgotten just as rapidly as it has
been acquired, or, as we should rather say, accumu-
lated. And it drops out of mind thus glibly, simply,
and solely, and obviously, because it has never been
realized, so to speak, by the pupil's own inner
consciousness. Supposing, however, for the
sake of argument, that anything like a strain or effort
has been put upon the young scholar's intelligence in
the process of mastering (for the one imminent pur-
pose) the multitude of details placed together within
reach of his acquisition, the result, then, might be
even worse—will, in all human probability, be even
worse—than simply the losing of that loosely-obtained
masa of information. His faculties will become, in
that case, not improbably, dulled and muddled per-
manently, by their premature or precocious deve-
lopment. As Mr. DICKENS describe; it to have

been with Dr. BLIMBER'S favourite pupil, in
that intellectual forcing house—the human plant
will blow, and blow, and blow, until it becomes
at last a mere stalk ! Hence really we believe the
otherwise bewildering circumstance, that hardly
ever has a SeniOr Wrangler obtained any after-
celebrity in public .life. Baron ALDERSON, in that
respect, being almost, and we might say, the single
exception that proves the rule. No ; our convic-
tion is that the thing is being overdone. To be
consistently carried out, it ought to be applied,
this system of Competitive Examinations, not
merely at the outset, but at intervals, peri-
odically among all the holders of public offices, not
in this or in that department, but in all the depart-
ments indiscriminately. And if so applied we wonder
how the various holders of office—not merely those
who are stripling aspirants to become so —would
enjoy the felicity of its application ! How they
would care to be trotted out thus at intervals to show
their paces! Ilow they woul I like to have their
memoties thus searchingly refreshed ! What is gc o I
for the gosling muse, as a matter of course, be good
for the gander. And if there really is all the good
,ht.re is sail to be in this wonderful system of Com-
petitive Examinations, the more widely that system
can be applied surely the better.

TILE nation makes indifferent prog,ress in its eflbrts
to convince itself that bribery is a grievous moral
offence. The Government, at all events, does not
seem to be very keenly alive to the sin of corruption,
otherwise the names of Messrs. SCHNEIDER
and FEN\VICK would not have again coma
before public notice. These gentlemen, it