In the meantime Sir Charles Trevelyan, a distinguished
Indian Civilian who had married Macaulay’s sister,
had been asked to inquire, with the help of Sir Stafford
Northcote, into the method of appointment in the Home
Civil Service. His report appeared in the spring
of 1854,[87] and is one of the ablest of those State
Papers which have done so much to mould the English
constitution during the last two generations.
It showed the intolerable effects on the personnel
of the existing Service of the system by which the
Patronage Secretary of the Treasury distributed appointments
in the national Civil Service among those members of
parliament whose votes were to be influenced or rewarded,
and it proposed that all posts requiring intellectual
qualifications should be thrown open to those young
men of good character who succeeded at a competitive
examination in the subjects which then constituted
the education of a gentleman.
[87] Reports and Papers on the Civil Service,
1854-5.
But to propose that members of parliament should give
up their own patronage was a very different thing
from asking them to take away the patronage of the
East India Company. Sir Charles Trevelyan, therefore,
before publishing his proposal, sent it round to a
number of distinguished persons both inside and outside
the Government service, and printed their very frank
replies in an appendix.
Most of his correspondents thought that the idea was
hopelessly impracticable. It seemed like the
intrusion into the world of politics of a scheme of
cause and effect derived from another universe—as
if one should propose to the Stock Exchange that the
day’s prices should be fixed by prayer and the
casting of lots. Lingen, for instance, the permanent
head of the Education Office, wrote considering that,
as matter of fact, patronage is one element of power,
and not by any means an unreal one; considering the
long and inestimably valuable habituation of the people
of this country to political contests in which the
share of office ... reckons among the legitimate prizes
of war; considering that socially and in the business
of life, as well as in Downing Street, rank and wealth
(as a fact, and whether we like it or not) hold the
keys of many things, and that our modes of thinking
and acting proceed, in a thousand ways, upon this
supposition, considering all these things, I should
hesitate long before I advised such a revolution of
the Civil Service as that proposed by yourself and
Sir Stafford Northcote.’[88] Sir James Stephen
of the Colonial Office put it more bluntly, ’The
world we live in is not, I think, half moralised enough
for the acceptance of such a scheme of stern morality
as this.’[89] When, a few years later, competition
for commissions in the Indian army was discussed, Queen
Victoria (or Prince Albert through her) objected that
it reduced the sovereign to a mere signing machine.’[90]
[88] Reports and Papers on the Civil Service,
pp. 104, 105.
