ting,
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 platitude. 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 competitive 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 competition 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 competition
itself as varying in a thousand different directions, and shading by
imperceptible gradations into other methods of appointment; and of the
posts offered for competition as differing each from all the rest, as
overlapping those posts for which competition 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 competition 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 serio