n 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 municipal 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 municipal
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
competition for boy clerks, even more inadequate than those carried on
by municipalities; 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 competition by
the hasty writing of answers to unexpected examination questions as an
unchangeable entity. 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,