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 competition 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 constitute 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 classes' 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 constitutional 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 vo