hat was quite sufficient for me. I had, therefore, you see, no cause
of quarrel with the examining board. They had, it is true, made me out
to have only barely come up to the required standard in French--a
language with which I had been familiar from childhood; but, they
compensated for this, by according me full marks in book-keeping--which
I had been totally ignorant of a week before the examination; and, I
only answered the questions asked me therein through dint of the
wholesale theoretical cramming of my tutor!

So much for the value of the ordeal.

I maintain that, in many instances, these competitive examinations are
quite uncalled-for, and a great mistake.

In the one I was engaged in, for example, two-thirds of the candidates
were men who had already been employed in the public service as
"writers"--some for years. Now, if these were held competent to fulfil
the duties of office life, as they must have been, or they would not be
thus employed, surely, it was unnecessary, as well as unfair and absurd,
to subject them to test the school-boy acquirements, that many had
forgotten, which offered no real proof of their aptitude to be public
accountants.

And, secondly, I firmly believe that competition neither produces the
best clerks--out of those who thus initiate their official life, and who
might not have been engaged beforehand, as writers or otherwise; nor
does the system, as I've already said, afford any guarantee for a sound
education on the part of those examined.

The Polite Letter Writer Commissioners, I have no doubt, do their duty
as well as they can, in that position and state of life to which an
enthusiastic reformer, backed up by an Act of Parliament, has called
them; but, at the present time, ignorance has every facility afforded it
for riding rampant over their "crucial" tests, while "crammers" drive,
with the greatest glee, coaches and sixes by the score through their
most zealous enactments.

If the competitive theory is to be the basis of our civil service
organisation, it should be extended to all classes and grades in
official life; and not be limited merely to the junior clerk at the
bottom of the red-tape ladder.

Let every one, up to the under-secretaries of state and members of the
cabinet even, be examined and tested and docketed in due order of
merit--in the same way as the Chinese conduct their mandarin school--and
distribute variously coloured buttons to graduates of differen