o much to mould
the English constitution 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
competitive examination in the subjects which then constituted 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,
competition for commissions in the Indian army was discussed, Queen
Victoria (