language that an
official of the British Empire may happen to need. It does not apply to
the Indian tongues, nor to Chinese, nor, I should suppose, to the Fiji
dialects. The only human faculty that is tested and brought into play in
these acquisitions is the commonest kind of memory exercised for a
certain time. The value to the Service of the man that can excel in
spoken languages does not lie in his superior administrative ability,
but in his being sooner fitted for actual duty. Undoubtedly, if two men
go out to Calcutta so unequal in their knowledge of native languages, or
in the preparation for that knowledge, that one can begin work in six
months, while the other takes nine, there is an important difference
between them. But what is the obvious mode of rewarding the difference?
Not, I should think, by pronouncing one a higher man in the scale of the
competition, but by giving him some money prize in proportion to the
redemption of his time for official work.

Now, as regards the second kind of languages--those that are supposed to
carry with them all the valuable indirect consequences that we have just
reviewed. There are in the Civil Service Scheme five such languages--two
ancient, and three modern. They are kept there, not because they are
ever to be read or spoken in the Service, but because they exercise some
magical efficacy in elevating the whole tone of the human intellect.

If I were discussing the Indian Civil Service in its own specialities,
I would deprecate the introduction of extraneous languages into the
competition, for this reason, that the Service itself taxes the verbal
powers more than any other service. I do not think that Lord Macaulay
and his colleagues had this circumstance fully in view. Macaulay was
himself a glutton for language; and, while in India, read a great
quantity of Latin and Greek. But he was exempted from the ordinary lot
of the Indian civil servant; he had no native languages to acquire and
to use. If a man both speaks and writes in good English, and converses
familiarly in several Oriental dialects, his language memory is
sufficiently well taxed, and if he carries with him one European
language besides, it is as much as belongs to the fitness of things in
that department.

[SECONDARY USES OF LANGUAGE DIRECTLY TESTED.]

My proposal, then, goes the length of excluding all these five
cultivated languages from the competition, notwithstanding the influence
that they may be sup