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persons who had no other provision in life. It was, in fact, a provision for the poorer members of the middle class, and this was an abuse. But in open competition, the superior advantage of education, backed by all the resources of wealth, must carry off the greater number of prizes. This result was, however, wholly unexpected.

The next great experiment in open competition, the Indian Civil Engineering College at Cooper's Hill, is too recent to admit of many conclusions being drawn from it, but the prominent place this young institution has already attained to in the athletic contests now so popular, shows that at least there is no failing on the side of physical power. The competition for this college will perhaps not attract many men of exceptional ability; but by the exclusion of the ignorant and idle, who form a substantial part of the classes at most technical colleges where no entrance test is imposed, and whose presence requires that the lecturers should teach down to their level, it should be possible to carry out a much higher and more sustained course of technical education than has ever been attempted before in this country.

One word must be said as to the objection sometimes raised against competitive examinations, as against tests of qualification generally, that they would shut out from the public service, and especially from the Indian Service, the uneducated men of action who have furnished in earlier times its most distinguished members. Clive could not spell, it is said, therefore Clive would have been lost to the country under an educational test system; and so with others of the heroic type, who have carved out their fortunes by force of character and intuitive genius without the help of education. It might be sufficient to reply to this sort of criticism, that some classes must always be excluded from the public service, whatever may be the system of first appointment. How many possible Clives and Lawrences have been lost to their country because they did not happen to be connected with an East Indian Director? But to say that Clive could not spell is about as much to the point as to say that he did not know how to write with a steel pen. Spelling and education generally were not needful acquirements in his time; but can it be doubted that a lad with Clive's energy and force of character would not have mastered the very moderate difficulties of an examination for admission to the army, if such a test had then been imposed? Napoleon and Wellington would probably have done well at a competitive examination; so, to turn to the Indian Service, would the two eminent brothers, Henry and John Lawrence; and, as Lord

Macaulay well points out, Elphinstone and Metcalfe, the two most distinguished civilians of the last generation, were both men of scholarly minds. Munro and Malcolm also were much above par in respect of literary power. But in fact this sort of argument need hardly be seriously pursued. Regarding these examinations not as a means of securing exceptional ability, but rather as a means of shutting out exceptional stupidity, it may be confidently said that there can be named scarcely a single eminent military or civil servant of the State who would have been excluded from the public service by the existing tests, provided they had had proper opportunities for preparing to undergo them.

But this does not prove the competitive system to be the best possible one for recruiting the public service, or that it is even a good one absolutely. On the contrary, notwithstanding the unsubstantial nature of many of the prejudices entertained regarding it, and while it has been successful at Woolwich, furnishing a supply of young officers to the Artillery and Engineers of fair abilities and otherwise unexceptionable, it must be pronounced to have proved a decided failure as regards the Indian Civil Service. Not so much because it has failed to attract men of exceptional capacity, as the advocates for the change expected, for the system, as will be presently seen, is carefully devised to prevent such men from coming forward, or, if they come forward, from succeeding in the competition; but because it affords no more sufficient check to the admission of unfit persons to the service than the system of nomination which it superseded, although the unfitness to be guarded against is of a different kind. This charge, if true, amounts to condemnation of the system; for the old method of nomination was confessedly vicious, although what was defective in it might easily have been remedied without any such radical change as took place. The Directors of the East India Company were remunerated for the position which they had gained after a tedious and often humiliating canvass, chiefly by the patronage attached to it, and their patronage they used accordingly solely for their own benefit, or in repayment to the shareholders of Indian stock whose votes had secured their election. There is on record no single instance of the Court of Directors having collectively conferred a nomination to the Indian Service on public grounds. However distinguished might be the public services of an Indian official, civil or military, these established no claim to any provision for his children; appointments for them must in every case be obtained by favour at the hands of an indi

vidual Director. And this view being held of the rights of patronage, it was not to be supposed that the Directors should have a strong opinion of the importance of tests of qualification. The establishment of Haileybury College for the education of their civil servants was forced upon the Court by public opinion and Parliament, but the object for which it was established might practically be evaded. There would be little use in making nominations to the Civil Service if the nominees were after all to be excluded; and accordingly it soon came to be understood between the Directors and their staff at Haileybury that no ordinary degree of dulness or idleness should bar a young man from final appointment. Hence the result, that while the average ability of the Indian Civil Service was always respectable, as indeed it could hardly fail to be, since the business of that noble profession will always bring out what is best in a man; and while it always produced a sufficient proportion of able men to occupy the higher posts; every now and then persons found their way into the service who were utterly unfit for any responsible duties whatever. Yet the traditionary system of promotion required that they should rise at least to the position of a district magistrate, charged with the control and well-being of perhaps a million of people, or in extreme cases be relegated to the comparatively innocuous office of a district judge, vested with the chief civil and criminal jurisdiction over the same extent of country.

The scandal caused by such occasional abuses led to the abolition of this valuable patronage; but these cases do not prove the failure of a system of patronage properly controlled. If, while the nominations to the Indian Civil Service had continued to rest with the Directors, the control of Haileybury College and the regulation of the standard of education to be maintained there had been vested in some independent authority, with power to weed the service of all mentally incompetent candidates by the imposition of proper tests, the main objection attaching to the nomination system would have been removed. But instead of this obvious remedy, the drastic measure was adopted of sweeping away patronage altogether; nevertheless under the new system of open competition which has replaced it, precisely the same kind of evil is reproduced under a different form. It is not, as we have said, that these competitions fail to attract all the rising talent of English youth, although that is no doubt the case. Exceptional genius is not wanted for the Indian Service so much as a general level of fair ability. Nor is there any reason

to suppose that on the average there is any degeneracy of physical power, while it is an enormous advantage to have excluded the mental incompetence which was the weak point of the old system. But the new system, equally with that it has replaced, fails to furnish sufficient means for keeping out all the men who ought to be excluded. It provides the needful supply of brains, and under proper medical scrutiny a sufficient measure of health and strength will go with them; but it seems to be forgotten that these are not the only qualifications necessary, and it is only too notorious that these examinations as now conducted may and do give men to the service who are quite out of place in it, being deficient in some essential qualities required in rulers of men, especially of races so quick to appreciate the slight differences which distinguish one large class of Englishmen from all the rest, and who are as much under the personal influence of their rulers, as are the people of India. A man may have fair talents, but if he is not the sort of man wanted for the position he holds, the system which plants him there is obviously faulty. Some of the young civilians appointed under the new system by their deficiency in certain particulars have brought ridicule on themselves and discredit on the whole service, and have thus been the cause of an unquestionable and yet perfectly needless evil, and one which moreover admits of easy remedy. For after all, this is not the result of competition merely as such. Those who point to the unfortunate cases we have referred to as the necessary result of the system, forget that the English universities are, and long have been, the seat of unlimited competition, and that in this sense they are in fact the most democratic of institutions. There is hardly a scholarship at either Oxford or Cambridge which is not perfectly open to all comers, the sole test of qualification, in addition to that of good moral character, being a paper examination; and as a matter of fact these valuable prizes are often carried off by youths of the humblest origin; yet no one contests the propriety of thus throwing them perfectly open. On the contrary, the system is generally recognised as furnishing one very wholesome mode of fusion between the different classes of our countrymen; the absorption which thus goes on by the middle classes of rising talent generated in a lower social stratum, is admitted to be a thoroughly conservative process. But then the competitive examination in these cases is merely the preliminary to a course of university education, and it is this which converts the raw lad who comes up with a scholarship from some little country grammar school into an educated gentleman. Some people

may say, indeed, that the concourse of a number of youths thrown together as they are at the university, making their own society, is not calculated to humanise, and that what is called a university education means often merely that the idleness and self-indulgent extravagance of public school-life are repeated in an exaggerated form; but the homely lad who has won his scholarship by honest hard work, and to whom university life comes as the revelation of a new world, is just the one to gain all the benefit and escape all the evils of which that life offers the choice; him the university transforms into a different being. It is just this polish, the action of which is so valuable and yet so difficult to define, that the present system of appointment to the Indian Civil Service fails to give. The youngster who wins a place in the competition straight from a Scotch or Irish university, or perhaps after a brief course of training under a crammer' in London, whither he has been sent up from the country to be run,' as the phrase goes, for the Indian Civil,' is then left to pursue his subsequent course of technical preparation as he pleases. Shy, awkward, with a slender purse, and perhaps a stranger to the metropolis, he will probably establish himself in some humble lodging in the outskirts of the town, there to pursue his solitary studies, only emerging from his retreat to present himself at the stated periods before the examiners, till at the end of his two years' probation he is reported qualified for the service and sent out to India.

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Such, in many cases, has been the mode of life of the selected candidates; but this is not the way in which the rulers of a nation should be prepared for their great duties, men who are to govern the millions of India as much by force of character and knowledge of the world, and the impalpable qualities which make up the English gentleman, as by mere ability and book-learning. This at least is certain, that if the method of preparation pursued for the Indian Civil Service. be right, then the whole system of English education must be wrong. But if, on the other hand, the training of public school and university be a good preparation for public life, then it is preposterous that our Indian administrators should be chosen by a mode which does not prevent the election of some uncouth eccentric recluse, who, except in the power to pass an examination, is utterly unfit for the practical business. of his profession.

But the blunder does not stop here. Formerly, the young civilians on arrival at India passed a year or more at one of the presidency towns, most of them at Calcutta, a few at

VOL. CXXXIX. NO. CCLXXXIV.

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