loses his vessel, he is brought to a court-martial; the First Lord of the Admiralty is not impeached. We believe that the public service would gain greatly in efficiency if the permanent members of the Civil Service were in some way rendered responsible for the work which they do and understand, instead of the parliamentary Secretary, who neither does it nor understands it at all. or memorandum to be submitted to He But what are these permanent functionaries? Let us see. There is first the permanent head of the office; say, the permanent Under-Secretary of State-perhaps there is also an Assistant Under-Secretary; and then there are several chiefs of departments, or, properly, sub-departments, under whom, again, are a number of clerks. The real work of the office is done by these several divisional chiefs. In different offices the work is divided in different ways. In the Foreign Office the division is geographical. One officer conducts the diplomatic correspondence with France, &c.; another with Turkey, and so on. In the Colonial Office there is the same geographical arrangement: one officer has charge of the North American department, another of the West Indian department, &c. In the India Office, the distribution of labour is not regulated by geographical limits, but is of a subjective character. One department, is, we repeat, the theory of our mental secretary* conducts the correspondence respecting the finances of India; another undertakes the legislative and judicial business; another the political (or diplomatic); a fourth the military, &c. &c. But whatever may be the character of the subdivision of labour, and whatsoever the forms of official procedure whether the secretary or chief clerk prepares at once answers to the departmental correspondence laid before him, or whether he prepares a minute government. There is an almost ludicrous incongruity between the moral and the constitutional responsibility in such cases-between the fact and the fiction of power. But although the permanent Under-Secretary supervises more or less the current business of the office, it is not his part generally to originate it. The initiative in most cases rests with the chief-clerk or departmental secretary, to whom is intrusted a certain class or division In the India Office the divisional chiefs are secretaries; in the other offices cited in the text they are chief clerks. The former designation should be more generally adopted when the duties are such as to warrant the title. The reader will of course bear in mind that there are in different departments of Government different forms of administrative agency. It being necessary, in tracing the course of official procedure, to individualise more or less, we have selected a Secretary of State's office (of which there are now five) as the most convenient for illustration. But what we write will apply, mutatis mutandis, to other departments. helpless ones we leave behind us. These are things of which men may think without imputation of avarice of the aggregate official work. It is his duty to be well versed in the particular antecedents of every case, and in the general precedents bear--which may be sought worthily ing upon it. His business is con- by the best of us. And a love of fined to a particular branch of the personal distinction, if a weakness, is tree, and therefore he is expected to be intimately acquainted with all its subordinate ramifications. Unless, therefore, he is signally deficient in capacity, he must be better acquainted with his subject than the superior official who superintends all the divisions of labour, and, after longer official experience, attains to a serviceable, but rarely to a minute, acquaintance with all. Of these minor functionaries—each in his own line exercising an important influence over the character of the public work -the world, however, hears little or nothing. But how much depends upon the efficiency of these men! Let the permanent head of the office be as capable as he may-and we have a very high opinion of the capacity of such functionaries as Mr Merivale, Sir George Clerk, Mr Hammond, &c. &c.--and let the parliamentary chief interfere in matters of detail as much as he can, still the greater amount of the work done will remain in the same state as that in which it has emanated from the minor functionary who first puts his pen to paper. If the men, with whom practically the initiative rests, are deficient in the capacity or the will to do their work, the general business of the department must go lamentably wrong. The immense importance, therefore, to the national interests, of a thoroughly effective staff of permanent officials, especially in the higher ranks, being admitted, a question arises, and a very grave one, as to whether we hold out sufficient inducements to men of first-rate intellectual capacity and energy to enter the public service. There are two things for which men toil, early and late-scorning delight, and living laborious days-the one is money, the other is honour. By money, of course, we mean all that money can purchase, for ourselves or for others personal comfort; the happiness and respecta bility of our families; the education of our children; provision for the an infirmity of noble minds," and may be cherished without shame. It may be true to some extent-nay, we believe that it is true to a very large extent-that good service is its own reward. Every good public servant knows the unspeakable contentment derived from the thought that he has done good work out of his own brain, by his own hand, unaided and alone, to whomsoever the credit may be given. It may bear another name, but it is still his. The peer or the baronet at the head of the department may, in popular estimation, have all the honour of its paternity, but it is none the less the good work of the real workman; and the world, which knows nothing of its greatest men," though it acknowledge him not as a benefactor, still owes everything to his labours. There is a sustaining power in the inward satisfaction derived from such reflections as these; but there are times when a man needs other support, and only the very great are able to "bear up and steer right on," supported only by "the conscience," under the depressing influence of unmerited neglect. Let us consider these two matters separately. And, firstly, in respect of the monied wages of the permanent civil servants of the Crown. In Mr Parkinson's little volume we may see before us at a glance the salaries of all principal officers "under Government," permanently engaged in the administration of the country. We can only find one appointment valued at more than £2000 per annum, and that is the appointment of Solicitor to the PostOffice. And this brings us, before we had intended it, to what may be regarded as the very root of the matter-viz. the high price which professional or technical knowledge fetches in the market, in comparison with administrative ability. That a solicitor attached to a public office should receive a salary higher than is paid to Under-Secretaries of State, and equal to the pay of the parliamentary chief of the department (the Postmaster - General), would excite unmeasured surprise, if it were not for the fact that all the liberal professions are notoriously better paid than the Government service. A successful lawyer or physician makes incomparably more money in the course of the year than the exercise of an equal amount of ability and industry would obtain for him in the employment of the Crown. There are scores of lawyers and physicians trebling the official income of an Under-Secretary of State, and yet, perhaps, not possessing half the capacity and perseverance of the public functionary. In other words, the community are infinitely better paymasters than the State. It is with reference to the ordinary amount of professional emolument, derivable from private practice, that the official salaries of lawyers are fixed at the highest figures to be found in the schedule. The salary of a permanent UnderSecretary of State is £2000. This is the ordinary salary of a solicitor in a public office, though we have shown that it may be exceeded. But although the due discharge of the duties of legal adviser to a public department necessarily demands good capacity, it can hardly be said to require so high an order of intellect as that which is necessary to the due performance of the administrative duties of an important official appointment. Yet to the greater number of official appointments, demanding the possession of a high order of ability, are attached salaries ranging no higher than £1000 or £1200 a-year. In the public service, indeed, £1000 or £1200 a-year is considered a large income. But a lawyer or doctor, not making a larger income than this, is not said to be in "good practice.' As a class, the civil servants of the Crown are poor men. The reader has only to turn over Mr Parkinson's book to ascertain how poor they are. If he could obtain access to the returns of the professional incomes of metropolitan practitioners, either in medicine or the law, the poverty of the public servants would be still more apparent. We do not see how, by any VOL. LXXXVII.-NO. DXXXI. possibility, indeed, an official man can make a fortune. Say that, after thirty or forty years' service, he rises, by slow stages, to an appointment with a salary of £1000 a-year. He has very probably by this time a large family, and having been compelled to live in or near London all his life, it is not unlikely that, whilst in the lower grades, he has accumulated debts to be paid off on acquiring the higher salary. And if he have neither family nor debt, he does not hold the maximum salary long enough to enable him to make a large purse before he drifts into superannuation. The instances of men in the English Civil Service who have left fortunes to their children, saved from their official salaries, are so few that they may be counted on your fingers. But we must not be unjust to the public service. It doubtless has its advantages. All private professional occupation is more or less precarious. A man may break down, under illhealth or some other accident, and may lose his practice altogether. His income may suddenly fall from thousands to hundreds, or to nil. But in a public office it takes a good deal (loss of character excepted) to bring a man down to this state. Loss of health, in the public service may injure, but it does not ruin a man. A Government servant can only claim as his right a certain number of days during which he may absent himself from his official duties. But, practically, in case of certified illness, considerable latitude is, and ought to be, allowed; and if frequently recurring attacks, or long-protracted incapacity, seriously mar his utility as a public servant, he can fall back upon the superannuation rules, and take his pension. There is a certainty, therefore-a reliableness in an official income, which, doubtless, recommends it to persons not of an aspiring or speculative character. It is something to be able to calculate your income (barring eccentricities of income-tax) to a fraction, and to know that at a certain age you may retire altogether from active business with a moderate competence, the amount of which you know beforehand as accurately as your present income. G But if there are special advantages in Government service, there are also special disadvantages to be taken into account. To enter the public service is necessarily to make a large sacrifice of independence; it is to place yourself under inconvenient restraint, to submit to rules and regulations framed by others, and to be debarred, in many instances, from that liberty of action which citizens of a free country claim as their birthright. Having chosen to be a public servant, he must be only a public servant. He must give up all his days to the State. He cannot absent himself from office without permission; he can neither go where he likes, nor say what he likes, nor do what he likes. He cannot, even though he performs his official duties satisfactorily in office hours, devote himself to any other business or profession. He must not sit in Parliament. He must not trade or speculate. It is a question to what extent he may, without offence, write for the public press. He is liable to be called to account for the opinions which he expresses, and to be told that a servant of Government ought to exercise a discreet reticence, and to remember what he owes to the Government he serves. He may be the victim any day of vague charges and arbitrary judgments, and is scarcely less at the mercy of a single individual than if he were in private employment. The pecuniary attractions not being sufficient to induce men of knowledge and ability of a high order to sacrifice their independence by entering the public service, it remains to be seen what other advantages there are to reconcile them to the scanty emoluments of Government employ. Is personal reputation to be gained? Are public honours within the reach of the public servant? The personal reputation gained by an able and industrious servant of Government seldom extends much beyond the walls of the public office in which he passes his life. He may help to make the reputation of half-adozen parliamentary statesmen; but he is fortunate, indeed, if he can make any reputation for himself. There is probably no position in life in which the sic vos non vobis principle is practically enunciated more thoroughly than in a public office. There may be occasional instances of the partial identification of irresponsible public servants with. the paternity of public measures for which parliamentary statesmen have stood sponsors and gained the larger praise-Mr Deacon Hume, and one or two others of the same class, might be named as exceptional cases of rare good fortune in this respect. But the rule is to ignore utterly the services of the permanent functionaries of the State; they labour on from year's end to year's end, and are as little known to the world at the end as at the commencement of their career. A successful lawyer or a successful physician makes for himself a name, and is a marked man wherever he goes. Whatsoever he does well is a part of himself-no one can deprive him of it. But a public servant may fill whole Bluebooks, and provide largely, by his own exertions, the materials of history, and yet be known, for his capacity, to no one beyond his own department of the State. But if the public have not the means of recognising the individual merits of those who serve them, surely, it may be said, the Government know the individual merits of the men who serve them, and will not suffer good service to go unrecognised and unhonoured. But what, in such a case, is Government? It is a sounding name; but, practically, it is little more than a myth. If we try to personify it, it is just this: it is either the administrative agency that does the work of the State; or it is the little cluster of fluctuating parliamentary officials; or it is the Queen on the throne. The first are the men themselves whose services call for honorary reward-so they are out of the question. The second-that is, the responsible parliamentary Ministers of the day-might recognise meritorious service, and recommend it for honorary distinction; but, somehow or other, they do not. We have heard it said that any large acknowledgment of the services of the permanent employés of the Crown would be constructively a detraction from the value of the services rendered by the "responsible Minister"-that, in other words, it is the interest of the Minister to keep up the fiction of a single ministerial agent as distinguished from a numerical ministerial agency-and that, therefore, little credit is to be given to those who understand and who do the work of a department. But we attribute no such paltry motives to our great parliamentary leaders. The real fact we believe is, that the changes at the head of the different departments are so frequent, that the Minister knows little and cares little about those who work under him, until his tenure of office is at an end; and that party objects, rather than administrative ends, being generally uppermost in his mind, he has no great inducement to solicit honorary distinctions for those who have nothing to do with party-who, indeed, are precluded from taking any part in the faction-fights of the hour. The only hope, then, of the public service, is in the Sovereign herself. The day may come when that hope will be fulfilled. That it has not yet been fulfilled is certain. Royal Calendars and Court Circulars tell the story. How many of the civil servants of the Crown have obtained honorary distinctions, after a life spent in the active service of the State? Military and naval officers are decorated every year, by scores. As a general rule, it may be said that the officer commanding a certain army, or a certain expedition, sends in the names of those whose regiments or ships have done good service, or who have distinguished themselves by some isolated act of gallantry. It is his privilege to name such officers in his despatches, and the Commander-inChief, or the War Minister in England, then recommends them for honorary distinction to the Crown. Everybody knows that there are certain specific rewards, such as brevet promotions, and the military Order of the Bath, set apart for those who fight their country's battles with swords, and muskets, and heavy guns. We have a high respect for men who are thus honourably distinguished. But has the State no other battles to be fought than those which are fought amidst the roar of artillery and the obscurity of sulphureous smoke? A military or naval officer is rewarded either because he displays personal courage in the field, or because he exhibits professional ability which enables him to apply the amount of military force at his disposal to the best possible use, or because he happens to be at a particular place, in a particular office, at a particular time. But if mere animal courage, or what is called "gallantry," of a somewhat higher order, is the quality recognised by the grant of Bath honours and brevet promotion, we are afraid that some of the remarks made by Mr Hosea Biglow, in his celebrated "Papers," about soldiers getting all the raps and officers all the honours, are not altogether impertinent. And if professional ability, or the right application to a particular purpose of the resources of the State, deserve honorary distinction in one line of Government employment, why not in another? A man leads his regiment into action, and the regiment does its duty in the face of the enemy. The commanding officer is made a C.B., or something higher. But perhaps the brother of this very colonel, who has made good use of his regiment, or, being in command of it, could not do otherwise than he did without running away, had been sitting in an office in London, pen in hand, working early and working late, to embark, to clothe, or to feed the whole army, of which his brother's regiment forms a part, and which never could have gone into the field at all without the successful exertions of the unrecognised civilian. The conclusion arrived at by the little Pippa, in Mr Browning's poem, is that "All service is the same with GodWith God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we, there is no last nor first." But, in our country, the temporal Government establishes a law the very reverse of this, and service, to be recognised and rewarded, must be service of a particular kind. Perhaps in no other country is the agency by |