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 assumed 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 accumulated 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 competition 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 Tite 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 Offic