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    the last infirmity of noble minds . ^ In the second place , having ^ their acres , their Rotten Counties , their game laws , and their parsons , they hare got all they want . Their only desire is to preserve , . their comforts . For that purpose they choose or hire a leader , and follow him as blindly as they can . Their discipline puts to shame the wayward adherents ofthe better cause . Even after the unspeakable insult of the Paxmerstom" resolution , the " Cannon Balls" to a man voted confidence in Diseaem , ridiculing his Budget in

    private all the while . Give this faction the power of the Executive Government , with the example of IJouis Napoleon ' s success before them , and his patronage to encourage them , and you will have done your best to endanger the existence of the last great Constitutional Government of Europe . ' The moment political Jesuitism was triumphant , religious Jesuitism would join it , as any reader of the Guardian may perceive , and the happy union of feudalism and priestcraft would be restored . The dreams of Ccxntngsby

    and Sybil made old Superstition feel young . ! Let us take care that they do not prove true . We have a right to call upon Liberals not to trifle with that sacred trust which England now holds as almost the sole guardian of the liberties of Europe . " We have also a right to call upon them not to disgrace the morality of Liberalism by encouraging a profligate intrigue . Where shall be the reward of sincere and conscientious Liberalism , if those who have borne the burden and heat of the day , whatever may be their short-comings , are to be cast aside for such alliances as these ?

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    THE REFORM FOE . TO-DAY . If pliblic inen at the present day want a " mission , " there is one almost vacant ; although there is a sufficient movement in it ready to be taken up and eonverted ~ to a useful national purpose . It is Administrative Heform . The totally disorganised , broken down state of the public service was only exposed in the Crimea ; it existed before , and under the quietude of peace was gradually doing us even more destructive mischief than it has been able to accomplish by the slaughter of British soldiers and the waste of our suBstance and money iff The

    reforms first assume a practical shape among the officials themselves . Mr . Gladstone had plans under his notice , though of far too pedantic an order to be of any real utility . One of the projects upon which a considerable amount of printing was expended , consisted in a systematic assorting of every department under fanciful heads , who would have carried on the reading and writing , the superintendence , the reporting , down even to the duties of the wardrobe and laundry , with the supernumerary task of reading the public newspapers and getting instruction out of them for the officials ! Even within the

    civil service , therefore , those benighted wiseacres recognise the fact that the journals are beginning to govern the country . Another plan was thrown out by Sir Chahles The-¦ veltan and Sir Stafford Nobthoote after conducting inquiries into several of the public departments with the assistance of gentlemen connected with each of those departments . This also was a literary scheme ,

    the striking part of which consisted in the suggestion that the candidates for admission to the public Bervico should \ indergo examination in Latin and Greek , French nnd German , Science abstract nnd applied , History , and a variety of other accomplishments taught at the best academies and at college . And now there is a new plan developed in a pamphlet entitled Our Government Offices . ( Bidgway . ) This is the best of all . It evidently has in

    some degree or other an official source . The writer is practically acquainted with the routine of business in more than one office—a fact which we can avouch from our own observation of the course of business in public departments . At the same time he writes with manifest independence . He has therefore knowledge , no lack of courage to grapple with difficulties , no bondage to an official superior ; but he evidently sees the interest ofthe public servants as well as ofthe publie in thorough reorganisation .

    The civil service constitutes an army scattered over the face of the United Kingdom . It comprises 16 , 000 persons . This force , however , may be divided into two classes about equal in number—one whose duties are of a purely mechanical order , and the other whose duties require some degree of mental capacity , even in the lowest ranks , while in the highest the members rise to the government of an empire . This army , be it remembered , really has to govern the Empire ,

    for it has practically to conduct all the affairs of the United Kingdom and its dependencies . The first object in forming such a corps would be to arrange it so that there should be some unity in its proceedings ; that the individuals composing it should , by promotion or transfer , be stationed at the posts for which they were most suited ; that a special capacity , coupled with judgment , should secure to a man his passing from one rank to another ; and that those should rise to the chief commands who best understand the business in its details

    and in its whole . The actual arrangement , however , is exactly the reverse . There is no Unity in the Service . — ' ^ Particular offices may be controlled without vigour or even ability , may be underhanded , or may want the services of clerks with pec uliar qualifications , but there is no correspondence ' between them and other departments to ascertain whether means of supplying the deficiencies may not be found , within the limits of the service itself ; one department , although located side by side with another , does not know of What it consists . In particular instances , and more especially

    during the present pressure , the heads of an overburdened office have borrowed clerks from other offices with some partial advantage to the augmented department , and with , in many instances , a serious loss to the office from which the officials are removed . The correspondence and intercourse between offices are so partial that the opportunities for co-operation in this way must be very ^ rare . . ( The evil is sometimes partially remedied by personal friendliness between superiors in the respective offices ; but even in these cases , self-convenience is too often considered by heads of de partments , and the fact is lost sight of , that the public service is not injured , but often benefited by the removal of a superior clerk from one department to another . ) It may happen , for al hard

    instance , that while department A , ready - worked , is obliged at a loss to give the assistance of an able accountant to department B , there are in departments G and H accountants of great ability applied to tasks of very little difficulty and very slight importance j but such men are unknown , and though originally men of energy and ability , often fall into common routine clerks , from the fact of no prospect being open to them for distinguishing themselves . This instance may serve to illustrate a thousand cases where departments possess men of peculiar qualifications urgently required in some other department , the head of which has no means of knowing the quarters in which the most appropriate assistance is lying comparatively unused . "

    A man is put into the service in a particular place , he may rise a little—but very slowly ; may ultimately retire on pensionif he lives long enough ; but , ho is not expected to do his work well , ho is not liable to punishment even for flagrant neglects , he has no hope , no fear ; and the consequence is , that if he can write a given number of letters —just enough to pass muster—or a given number of entries in the book , he may whistle " Peter Dick , " loll about the office , or go to spend the day at Gravesend , and everything will bo " kept quiet" for him . ' The officor above him can neither order him , lino him , reward him , nor put him under arrest , as a superior officer can in the army .

    The civil literature compiled every year by the public servants would form tons upon . tons of manuscript : the clerks labour as if their sole business were to create those tons ; but there is no effective report upon the business done , or upon the clerks who do it . The literary business is the most cumbersome ofthe impedimenta to a modern army : the sword has to wait upon the scribbling of the pen ; but it is the Civil Service that makes its duties consist in writing . Who is responsible for this state of things ? The official chiefs who go in and out of the Cabinet and cany with them their assistant Undersecretaries — these are the men who

    have to use the public departments , who are responsible for them to the country ; but absorbed with Parliamentary business , engaged in receiving calls , carried off by court ceremonies , and thoroughly occupied with the social and personal engagements of their own class , they have no time to learn what the public departments are , or how they are going on . They are masters who only visit their estates late in the day ; and as the custom of impeachment has become an antiquity , no responsibility is enforced upon these " responsible political statesmen . " The case is the same as if in a place of business the

    clerks in the different rooms had no commucation with each other , the heads of the firm only called occasionally to keep up an appearance of giving orders , and the business went on by its own weight , drifting away with the tides of time . This is not a metaphor , it is the actual state ofthe public departments of this country ; and when we go to fight the enemy , we find our worst enemies are our civil servants , We have 16 , 000 such enemies in the land , mostly very well-intentioned people , but , by the organisation of the department , enrolled , as a baud of traitors , to frustrate the public work by undertaking it and preventing its execution .

    The author of " Our Government Offices sketches a plan for reversing all these bad conditions—consolidating the whole service ; giving to each man rank and promotiou in the service , without reference to his merely departmental opportunities ; facilitating his transfer from one office to another , where he would bo more Useful ; rendering him liable

    topenalties , but ^ opening to him Toward and advancement ; and in short , enabling him to earn as much as he can , and the public to get out of him as much as he can give . Now this reform may be said to have originated within the public service , or from knowledge acquired there . What has the public done as yet to reform its own servants r Nothing . It takes almost as little attention to the subject as the political ministers of the Crown , or the House of Commons do ; and then we have traders in Parliament , journalists in the papers , local politicians at public meetings , complaining that they cannot get business done iu tho public departments !

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    WHAT WILL BECOME OF THE MILITIA ? The militia are " melting away I" Raised at rmjat expense , trained with considerable care , and in many cases with considerable success , many of the embodied regiments are rapidly becoming disembodied , non-cxistont , or shorn of two-thirds of thoir strength . in tlio

    Like so many of our efforts military line wo have managed to make this militia experiment no exception to the run of failures . Four Governments have had a hand in the creation of the militia . Lord John Russbi * a Government was shipwrecked on this subject ; then came Lord Dicmm' With Lord Pai .-mehston ' s assistance Lord Derby contrived to got the act of 1852 through the Parliament .

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    Apbh . 7 , 1855 ] THE LEADER , 325

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), April 7, 1855, page 325, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2085/page/13/