Human Nature in Politics Part 12

The creation of this Service was the one great political invention in nineteenth-century England, and like other inventions it was worked out under the pressure of an urgent practical problem. The method of appointing the officials of the East India Company had been a critical question in English politics since 1783. By that time it had already become clear that we could not permanently allow the appointment of the rulers of a great empire kept in existence by the English fleet and army to depend upon the irresponsible favour of the Company's directors.

Charles James Fox in 1783, with his usual heedlessness, proposed to cut the knot, by making Indian appointments, in effect, part of the ordinary system of parliamentary patronage; and he and Lord North were beaten over their India Bill, not only because George the Third was obstinate and unscrupulous, but because men felt the enormous political dangers involved in their proposal. The question, in fact, could only be solved by a new invention. The expedient of administering an oath to the Directors that they would make their appointments honestly, proved to be useless, and the requirements that the nominees of the Directors should submit to a special training at Hayleybury, though more effective, left the main evil of patronage untouched.

As early, therefore, as 1833, the Government Bill introduced by Macaulay for the renewal and revision of the Company's charter contained a clause providing that East India cadetships should be thrown open to compet.i.tion.[86] For the time the influence of the Directors was sufficient to prevent so great a change from being effected, but in 1853, on a further renewal of the Charter, the system of compet.i.tion was definitely adopted, and the first open examination for cadetships took place in 1855.

[86] It would be interesting if Lord Morley, now that he has access to the records of the East India House, would tell us the true intellectual history of this far-reaching suggestion. For the facts as now known, cf.

A.L. Lowell, _Colonial Civil Service_, pp. 243-256.

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 const.i.tution 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 compet.i.tive examination in the subjects which then const.i.tuted 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, compet.i.tion 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.

[89] _Ibid._, p. 78

[90] _Life of Queen Victoria_, vol. iii. p. 377 (July 29, 1858).

In 1870, however, sixteen years after Trevelyan's Report, Gladstone established open compet.i.tion throughout the English Civil Service, by an Order in Council which was practically uncriticised and unopposed; and the parliamentary government of England in one of its most important functions did in fact reduce itself 'to a mere signing machine.'

The causes of the change in the political atmosphere which made this possible const.i.tute one of the most interesting problems in English history. One cause is obvious. In 1867 Lord Derby's Reform Act had suddenly transferred the ultimate control of the House of Commons from the 'ten pound householders' in the boroughs to the working men. The old 'governing cla.s.ses' may well have felt that the patronage which they could not much longer retain would be safer in the hands of an independent Civil Service Commission, interpreting, like a blinded figure of Justice, the verdict of Nature, than in those of the dreaded 'caucuses,' which Mr. Schnadhorst was already organising.

But one seems to detect a deeper cause of change than the mere transference of voting power. The fifteen years from the Crimean War to 1870 were in England a period of wide mental activity, during which the conclusions of a few penetrating thinkers like Darwin or Newman were discussed and popularised by a crowd of magazine writers and preachers and poets. The conception was gaining ground that it was upon serious and continued thought and not upon opinion that the power to carry out our purposes, whether in politics or elsewhere, must ultimately depend.

Carlyle in 1850 had asked whether 'democracy once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such-like, will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real,' and had answered, 'Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely const.i.tutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain those conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot--the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again.'[91]

[91] _Latter Day Pamphlets, No. I, The Present Time_. (Chapman and Hall, 1894, pp. 12 and 14.)

By 1870 Carlyle's lesson was already well started on its course from paradox to plat.i.tude. The most important single influence in that course had been the growth of Natural Science. It was, for instance, in 1870 that Huxley's _Lay Sermons_ were collected and published. People who could not in 1850 understand Carlyle's distinction between the Delusive and the Eeal, could not help understanding Huxley's comparison of life and death to a game of chess with an unseen opponent who never makes a mistake.[92] And Huxley's impersonal Science seemed a more present aid in the voyage round Cape Horn than Carlyle's personal and impossible Hero.

[92] _Lay Sermont_, p. 31, 'A Liberal Education' (1868).

But the invention of a compet.i.tive Civil Service, when it had once been made and adopted, dropped from the region of severe and difficult thought in which it originated, and took its place in our habitual political psychology. We now half-consciously conceive of the Civil Service as an unchanging fact whose good and bad points are to be taken or left as a whole. Open compet.i.tion has by the same process become a principle, conceived of as applying to those cases to which it has been in fact applied, and to no others. What is therefore for the moment most needed, if we are to think fruitfully on the subject, is that we should in our own minds break up this fact, and return to the world of infinite possible variations. We must think of the expedient of compet.i.tion itself as varying in a thousand different directions, and shading by imperceptible gradations into other methods of appointment; and of the posts offered for compet.i.tion as differing each from all the rest, as overlapping those posts for which compet.i.tion in some form is suitable though it has not yet been tried, and as touching, at the marginal point on their curve, those posts for which compet.i.tion is unsuitable.

Directly we begin this process one fact becomes obvious. There is no reason why the same system should not be applied to the appointment of the officials of the local as to those of the central government. It is an amazing instance of the intellectual inertia of the English people that we have never seriously considered this point. In America the term Civil Service is applied equally to both groups of offices, and 'Civil Service principles' are understood to cover State and Munic.i.p.al as well as Federal appointments. The separation of the two systems in our minds may, indeed, be largely due to the mere accident that from historical reasons we call them by different names. As it is, the local authorities are (with the exception that certain qualifications are required for teachers and medical officers) left free to do as they will in making appointments. Perhaps half a dozen Metropolitan and provincial local bodies have adopted timid and limited schemes of open compet.i.tion. But in all other cases the local civil servants, who are already probably as numerous as those of the central government,[93] are appointed under conditions which, if the Government chose to create a Commission of Inquiry, would probably be found to have reproduced many of the evils that existed in the patronage of the central government before 1855.

[93] The figures in the census of 1901 were--National, 90,000; Local, 71,000. But the local officials since then have, I believe, increased much more rapidly than the national.

It would not, of course, be possible to appoint a separate body of Civil Service Commissioners to hold a separate examination for each locality, and difficulties would arise from the selection of officials by a body responsible only to the central government, and out of touch with the local body which controls, pays, and promotes them when appointed. But similar difficulties have been obviated by American Civil Service Reformers, and a few days' hard thinking would suffice to adapt the system to English local conditions.

One object aimed at by the creation of a compet.i.tive Civil Service for the central government in England was the prevention of corruption. It was made more difficult for representatives and officials to conspire together in order to defraud the public, when the official ceased to owe his appointment to the representative. If an English member of parliament desired now to make money out of his position, he would have to corrupt a whole series of officials in no way dependent on his favour, who perhaps intensely dislike the human type to which he belongs, and who would be condemned to disgrace or imprisonment years after he had lost his seat if some record of their joint misdoing were unearthed.

This precaution against corruption is needed even more clearly under the conditions of local government. The expenditure of local bodies in the United Kingdom is already much larger than that of the central State, and is increasing at an enormously greater rate, while the fact that most of the money is spent locally, and in comparatively small sums, makes fraud easier. English munic.i.p.al life is, I believe, on the whole pure, but fraud does occur, and it is encouraged by the close connection that may exist between the officials and the representatives. A needy or thick-skinned urban councillor or guardian may at any moment tempt, or be tempted, by a poor relation who helped him at his election, and for whom (perhaps as the result of a tacit understanding that similar favours should be allowed to his colleagues), he obtained a munic.i.p.al post.

The railway companies, again, in England are coming every year more and more under State control, but no statesman has ever attempted to secure in their case, as was done in the case of the East India Company a century ago, some reasonable standard of purity and impartiality in appointments and promotion. Some few railways have systems of compet.i.tion for boy clerks, even more inadequate than those carried on by munic.i.p.alities; but one is told that under most of the companies both appointment and promotion may be influenced by the favour of directors or large shareholders. We regulate the minutiae of coupling and signalling on the railways, but do not realise that the safety of the public depends even more directly upon their systems of patronage.

How far this principle should be extended, and how far, for instance, it would be possible to prevent the head of a great private firm from ruining half a country side by leaving the management of his business to a hopelessly incompetent relation, is a question which depends, among other things, upon the powers of political invention which may be developed by collectivist thinkers in the next fifty years.

We must meanwhile cease to treat the existing system of compet.i.tion by the hasty writing of answers to unexpected examination questions as an unchangeable ent.i.ty. That system has certain very real advantages. It is felt by the candidates and their relations to be 'fair.' It reveals facts about the relative powers of the candidates in some important intellectual qualities which no testimonials would indicate, and which are often unknown, till tested, to the candidates themselves. But if the sphere of independent selection is to be widely extended, greater variety must be introduced into its methods. In this respect invention has stood still in England since the publication of Sir Charles Trevelyan's Report in 1855. Some slight modifications have taken place in the subjects chosen for examination, but the enormous changes in English educational conditions during the last half century have been for the most part ignored. It is still a.s.sumed that young Englishmen consist of a small minority who have received the nearly uniform 'education of a gentleman,' and a large majority who have received no intellectual training at all. The spread of varied types of secondary schools, the increasing specialisation of higher education, and the experience which all the universities of the world have acc.u.mulated as to the possibility of testing the genuineness and intellectual quality of 'post graduate' theses have had little or no effect.

The Playfair Commission of 1875 found that a few women were employed for strictly subordinate work in the Post Office. Since then female typewriters and a few better-paid women have been introduced into other offices in accordance with the casual impulses of this or that parliamentary or permanent chief; but no systematic attempt has been made to enrich the thinking power of the State by using the trained and patient intellects of the women who graduate each year in the newer, and 'qualify by examination to graduate,' in the older Universities.

To the general public indeed, the adoption of open compet.i.tion in 1870 seemed to obviate any necessity for further consideration not only of the method by which officials were appointed but also of the system under which they did their work. The race of t.i.te Barnacles, they learnt, was now to become extinct. Appointment was to be by 'merit,' and the announcement of the examination results, like the wedding in a middle-Victorian novel, was to be the end of the story. But in a Government office, as certainly as in a law-court or a laboratory, effective thinking will not be done unless adequate opportunities and motives are secured by organisation during the whole working life of the appointed officials. Since 1870, however, the organisation of the Government Departments has either been left to the casual development of office tradition in each Department or has been changed (as in the case of the War Office) by an agitation directed against one Department only.

The official relations, for instance, between the First Division minority and the Second Division majority of the clerks in each office vary, not on any considered principle, but according to the opinions and prejudices of some once-dominant but now forgotten chief. The same is true of the relation between the heads of each section and the officials immediately below them. In at least one office important papers are brought first to the chief. His decision is at once given and is sent down the hierarchy for elaboration. In other offices the younger men are given invaluable experience, and the elder men are prevented from getting into an official rut by a system which requires that all papers should be sent first to a junior, who sends them up to his senior accompanied not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute of his own suggesting official action. One of these two types of organisation must in fact be better than the other, but no one has systematically compared them.

In the Colonial Office, again, it is the duty of the Librarian to see that the published books as well as the office records on any question are available for every official who has to report on it. In the Board of Trade, which deals with subjects on which the importance of published as compared with official information is even greater, room has only just been found for a technical library which was collected many years ago.[94] The Foreign Office and the India Office have libraries, the Treasury and the Local Government Board have none.

[94] For a long time the Library of the Board of Trade was kept at the Foreign Office.

In the Exchequer and Audit Department a deliberate policy has been adopted of training junior officials by transferring them at regular intervals to different branches of the work. The results are said to be excellent, but nothing of the kind is systematically done or has even been seriously discussed in any other Department which I know.

Nearly all departmental officials are concerned with the organisation of non-departmental work more directly executive than their own, and part of a wise system of official training would consist in 'seconding'

young officials for experience in the kind of work which they are to organise. The clerks of the Board of Agriculture should be sent at least once in their career to help in superintending the killing of infected swine and interviewing actual farmers, while an official in the Railway section of the Board of Trade should acquire some personal knowledge of the inside of a railway office. This principle of 'seconding' might well be extended so as to cover (as is already done in the army) definite periods of study during which an official, on leave of absence with full pay, should acquire knowledge useful to his department; after which he should show the result of his work, not by the answering of examination questions, but by the presentation of a book or report of permanent value.

The grim necessity of providing, after the events of the Boer War, for effective thought in the government of the British army produced the War Office Council. The Secretary of State, instead of knowing only of those suggestions that reach him through the 'bottle-neck' of his senior official's mind, now sits once a week at a table with half a dozen heads of sub-departments. He hears real discussion; he learns to pick men for higher work; and saves many hours of circ.u.mlocutory writing. At the same time, owing to a well-known fact in the physiology of the human brain, the men who are tired of thinking on paper find a new stimulus in the spoken word and the presence of their fellow human beings, just as politicians who are tired with talking, find, if their minds are still uninjured, a new stimulus in the silent use of a pen.

If this periodical alternation of written and oral discussion is useful in the War Office, it would probably be useful in other offices; but no one with sufficient authority to require an answer has ever asked if it is so.

One of the most important functions of a modern Government is the effective publication of information, but we have no Department of Publicity, though we have a Stationery Office; and it is, for instance, apparently a matter of accident whether any particular Department has or has not a Gazette and how and when that Gazette is published. Nor is it any one's business to discover and criticise and if necessary co-ordinate the statistical methods of the various official publications.

On all these points and many others a small Departmental Committee (somewhat on the lines of that Esher Committee which reorganised the War Office in 1904), consisting perhaps of an able manager of an Insurance Company, with an open-minded Civil Servant, and a business man with experience of commercial and departmental organisation abroad, might suggest such improvements as would without increase of expense double the existing intellectual output of our Government offices.

But such a Committee will not be appointed unless the ordinary members of parliament, and especially the members who advocate a wide extension of collective action, consider much more seriously than they do at present the organisation of collective thought. How, for instance, are we to prevent or minimise the danger that a body of officials will develop 'official' habits of thought, and a sense of a corporate interest opposed to that of the majority of the people? If a sufficient proportion of the ablest and best equipped young men of each generation are to be induced to come into the Government service they must be offered salaries which place them at once among the well-to-do cla.s.ses.

How are we to prevent them siding consciously or unconsciously on all questions of administration with their economic equals? If they do, the danger is not only that social reform will be delayed, but also that working men in England may acquire that hatred and distrust of highly educated permanent officials which one notices in any gathering of working men in America.

We are sometimes told, now that good education is open to every one, that men of every kind of social origin and cla.s.s sympathy will enter to an increasing extent the higher Civil Service. If that takes place it will be an excellent thing, but meanwhile any one who follows the development of the existing examination system knows that care is required to guard against the danger that preference in marking may, if only from official tradition, be given to subjects like Greek and Latin composition, whose educational value is not higher than others, but excellence in which is hardly ever acquired except by members of one social cla.s.s.

It would, of course, be ruinous to sacrifice intellectual efficiency to the dogma of promotion from the ranks, and the statesmen of 1870 were perhaps right in thinking that promotion from the second to the first division of the service would be in their time so rare as to be negligible. But things have changed since then. The compet.i.tion for the second division has become incomparably more severe, and there is no reasonable test under which some of those second cla.s.s officials who have continued their education by means of reading and University teaching in the evening would not show, at thirty years of age, a greater fitness for the highest work than would be shown by many of those who had entered by the more advanced examination.

But however able our officials are, and however varied their origin, the danger of the narrowness and rigidity which has. .h.i.therto so generally resulted from official life would still remain, and must be guarded against by every kind of encouragement to free intellectual development. The German Emperor did good service the other day when he claimed (in a semi-official communication on the Tweedmouth letter) that the persons who are Kings and Ministers in their official capacity have as Fachmanner (experts) other and wider rights in the republic of thought. One only wishes that he would allow his own officials after their day's work to regroup themselves, in the healthy London fashion, with labour leaders, and colonels, and schoolmasters, and court ladies, and members of parliament, as individualists or socialists, or protectors of African aborigines, or theosophists, or advocates of a free stage or a free ritual.

The intellectual life of the government official is indeed becoming part of a problem which every year touches us all more closely. In literature and science as well as in commerce and industry the independent producer is dying out and the official is taking his place. We are nearly all of us officials now, bound during our working days, whether we write on a newspaper, or teach in a university, or keep accounts in a bank, by restrictions on our personal freedom in the interest of a larger organisation. We are little influenced by that direct and obvious economic motive which drives a small shopkeeper or farmer or country solicitor to a desperate intensity of scheming how to outstrip his rivals or make more profit out of his employees. If we merely desire to do as little work and enjoy as much leisure as possible in our lives, we all find that it pays us to adopt that steady unanxious 'stroke' which neither advances nor r.e.t.a.r.ds promotion.

The indirect stimulus, therefore, of interest and variety, of public spirit and the craftsman's delight in his skill, is becoming more important to us as a motive for the higher forms of mental effort, and threats and promises of decrease or increase of salary less important.

And because those higher efforts are needed not only for the advantage of the community but for the good of our own souls we are all of us concerned in teaching those distant impersonal masters of ours who are ourselves how to prevent the opportunity of effective thought from being confined to a tiny rich minority, living, like the Cyclops, in irresponsible freedom. If we consciously accept the fact that organised work will in future be the rule and unorganised work the exception, and if we deliberately adjust our methods of working as well as our personal ideals to that condition, we need no longer feel that the direction of public business must be divided between an uninstructed and unstable body of politicians and a selfish and pedantic bureaucracy.

CHAPTER IV

NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY

I have discussed, in the three preceding chapters, the probable effect of certain existing intellectual tendencies on our ideals of political conduct, our systems of representation, and the methods which we adopt for securing intellectual initiative and efficiency among our professional officials--that is to say, on the internal organisation of the State.