Our middle class, too, is very unfit to give us the administrators we ought to have.  I cannot now discuss whether all that is said against our education is well grounded; it is called by an excellent judge “pretentious, insufficient, and unsound”.  But I will say that it does not fit men to be men of business as it ought to fit them.  Till lately the very simple attainments and habits necessary for a banker’s clerk had a scarcity-value.  The sort of education which fits a man for the higher posts of practical life is still very rare; there is not even a good agreement as to what it is.  Our public officers cannot be as good as the corresponding officers of some foreign nations till our business education is as good as theirs. [Footnote:  I am happy to state that this evil is much diminishing.  The improvement of school education of the middle class in the last twenty-five years is marvellous.]

But strong as is our ignorance in deteriorating our administration, another cause is stronger still.  There are but two foreign administrations probably better than ours, and both these have had something which we have not had.  Theirs in both cases were arranged by a man of genius, after careful forethought, and upon a special design.  Napoleon built upon a clear stage which the French Revolution bequeathed him.  The originality once ascribed to his edifice was indeed untrue; Tocqueville and Lavergne have shown that he did but run up a conspicuous structure in imitation of a latent one before concealed by the mediaeval complexities of the old regime.  But what we are concerned with now is, not Napoleon’s originality, but his work.  He undoubtedly settled the administration of France upon an effective, consistent, and enduring system; the succeeding governments have but worked the mechanism they inherited from him.  Frederick the Great did the same in the new monarchy of Prussia.  Both the French system and the Prussian are new machines, made in civilised times to do their appropriate work.

The English offices have never, since they were made, been arranged with any reference to one another; or rather they were never made, but grew as each could.  The sort of free trade which prevailed in public institutions in the English Middle Ages is very curious.  Our three courts of law—­the Queen’s Bench, the Common Pleas, and the Exchequer—­for the sake of the fees extended an originally contracted sphere into the entire sphere of litigation.  Boni judicis est ampliare jursdictionem, went the old saying; or, in English, “It is the mark of a good judge to augment the fees of his Court,” his own income, and the income of his subordinates.  The central administration, the Treasury, never asked any account of the moneys the courts thus received; so long as it was not asked to pay anything, it was satisfied.  Only last year one of the many remnants of this system cropped up, to the wonder of the public.  A clerk in the Patent Office stole some fees, and naturally