OXFORD REFORM OPEN CIVIL SERVICE

(1854)

To rear up minds with aspirations and faculties above the herd, capable of leading on their countrymen to greater achievements in virtue, intelligence, and social well-being; to do this, and likewise so to educate the leisured classes of the community generally, that they may participate as far as possible in the qualities of these superior spirits, and be prepared to appreciate them, and follow in their steps these are purposes requiring institutions of education placed above dependence on the immediate pleasure of that very multitude whom they are designed to elevate. These are the ends for which endowed universities are desirable; they are those which all endowed universities profess to aim at; and great is their disgrace, if, having undertaken this task, and claiming credit for fulfilling it, they leave it unfulfilled. J. S. MILL.

The last waves of the tide of reform that had been flowing for a score of years, now at length reached the two ancient universities. The Tractarian revival with all its intense pre-occupations had given the antique Oxford a respite, but the hour struck, and the final effort of the expiring whigs in their closing days of power was the summons to Oxford and Cambridge to set their houses in order. Oxford had been turned into the battle-field on which contending parties in the church had at her expense fought for mastery. The result was curious. The nature of the theological struggle, by quickening mind within the university, had roused new forces; the antagonism between anglo-catholic and puritan helped, as it had done two centuries before, to breed the latitudinarian; a rising school in the sphere of thought and criticism rapidly made themselves an active party in the sphere of affairs; and Mr. Gladstone found himself forced to do the work of the very liberalism which his own theological leaders and allies had first organised themselves to beat down and extinguish.

FIRST OXFORD COMMISSION

In 1850 Lord John Russell, worked upon by a persevering minority in Oxford, startled the House of Commons, delighted the liberals, and angered and dismayed the authorities of the powerful corporations thus impugned, by the announcement of a commission under the crown to inquire into their discipline, state, and revenues, and to report whether any action by crown and parliament could further promote the interests of religion and sound learning in these venerable shrines. This was the first step in a long journey towards the nationalisation of the universities, and the disestablishment of the church of England in what seemed the best fortified of all her strongholds.

After elaborate correspondence with both liberal and tory sections in Oxford, Mr. Gladstone rose in his place and denounced the proposed commission as probably against the law, and certainly odious in the eye of the constitution. He undertook to tear in tatters the various modern precedents advanced by the government for their purpose; scouted the alleged visitorial power of the crown; insisted that it would blight future munificence; argued that defective instruction with freedom and self-government would, in the choice of evils, be better than the most perfect mechanism secured by parliamentary interference; admitted that what the universities had done for learning was perhaps less than it might have been, but they had done as much as answered the circumstances and exigencies of the country. When we looked at the lawyers, the divines, the statesmen of England, even if some might judge them inferior in mere scholastic and technical acquirements, why need we be ashamed of the cradles in which they were mainly nurtured? He closed with a triumphant and moving reference to Peel (dead a fortnight before), the most distinguished son of Oxford in the present century, and beyond all other men the high representative and the true type of the genius of the British House of Commons. In truth no worse case was ever more strongly argued, and fortunately the speech is to be recorded as the last manifesto, on a high theme and on a broad scale, of that toryism from which this wonderful pilgrim had started on his shining progress. It is just to add that the party in Oxford who resisted the commission was also the party most opposed to Mr. Gladstone, and further that the view of the crown having no right to issue such a commission in invitos was shared with him by Sir Robert Peel. Of this debate, Arthur Stanley (a strong supporter of the measure), tells us: ’The ministerial speeches were very feeble.... Gladstone’s was very powerful; he said, in the most effective manner, anything which could be said against the commission. His allusion to Peel was very touching, and the House responded to it by profound and sympathetic silence.... Heywood’s closing speech was happily drowned in the roar of “Divide,” so that nothing could be heard save the name of “Cardinal Wolsey” thrice repeated.’ The final division was taken on the question of the adjournment, when the government had a majority of 22. (July 18, 1850.)

II

REPORT OF THE COMMISSION

In Oxford the party of ‘organised torpor’ did not yield without a struggle. They were clamorous on the sanctity of property; contemptuous of the doctrine of the rights of parliament over national domains; and protestant collegians subsisting on ancient Roman catholic endowments edified the world on the iniquity of setting aside the pious founder. They submitted an elaborate case to the most eminent counsel of the day, and counsel advised that the commission was not constitutional, not legal, and not such as the members of the university were bound to obey. The question of duty apart from legal obligation the lawyers did not answer, but they suggested that a petition might be addressed to the crown, praying that the instrument might be cancelled. The petition was duly prepared, and duly made no difference. Many of the academic authorities were recalcitrant, but this made no difference either, nor did the Bishop of Exeter’s hot declaration that the proceeding had ’no parallel since the fatal attempt of King James II. to subject the colleges to his unhallowed control.’ The commissioners, of whom Tait and Jeune seem to have been the leading spirits, with Stanley and Mr. Goldwin Smith for secretaries, conducted their operations with tact, good sense, and zeal. At the end of two years (April 1852) the inquiry was completed and the report made public one of the high landmarks in the history of our modern English life and growth. ‘When you consider,’ Stanley said to Jowett, ’the den of lions through which the raw material had to be dragged, much will be excused. In fact the great work was to finish it at all. There is a harsh, unfriendly tone about the whole which ought, under better circumstances, to have been avoided, but which may, perhaps, have the advantage of propitiating the radicals.’

Mr. Gladstone thought it one of the ablest productions submitted in his recollection to parliament, but the proposals of change too manifold and complicated. The evidence he found more moderate and less sweeping in tone than the report, but it only deepened his conviction of the necessity of important and, above all, early changes. He did not cease urging his friends at Oxford to make use of this golden opportunity for reforming the university from within, and warning them that delay would be dearly purchased. ‘Gladstone’s connection with Oxford,’ said Sir George Lewis, ’is now exercising a singular influence upon the politics of the university. Most of his high church supporters stick to him, and (insomuch as it is difficult to struggle against the current) he is liberalising them, instead of their torifying him. He is giving them a push forwards instead of their giving him a pull backwards.’

The originators of the commission were no longer in office, but things had gone too far for their successors to burke what had been done. The Derby government put into the Queen’s speech, in November (1852), a paragraph informing parliament that the universities had been invited to examine the recommendations of the report. After a year’s time had been given them to consider, it became the duty of the Aberdeen government to frame a bill. The charge fell upon Mr. Gladstone as member for Oxford, and in the late autumn of 1853 he set to work. In none of the enterprises of his life was he more industrious or energetic. Before the middle of December he forwarded to Lord John Russell what he called a rude draft, but the rude draft contained the kernel of the plan that was ultimately carried, with a suggestion even of the names of the commissioners to whom operations were to be confided. ’It is marvellous to me,’ wrote Dr. Jeune to him (Dec 21, 1853), ’how you can give attention so minute to university affairs at such a crisis. Do great things become to great men from the force of habit, what their ordinary cares are to ordinary persons?’ As he began, so he advanced, listening to everybody, arguing with everybody, flexible, persistent, clear, practical, fervid, unconquerable. ‘I fear,’ Lord John Russell wrote to him (March 27), ’my mind is exclusively occupied with the war and the Reform bill, and yours with university reform.’ Perhaps, unluckily for the country, this was true. ‘My whole heart is in the Oxford bill,’ Mr. Gladstone writes (March 29); ’it is my consolation under the pain with which I view the character my office [the exchequer] is assuming under the circumstances of war.’ ’Gladstone has been surprising everybody here,’ writes a conspicuous high churchman from Oxford, ’by the ubiquity of his correspondence. Three-fourths of the colleges have been in communication with him, on various parts of the bill more or less affecting themselves. He answers everybody by return of post, fully and at length, quite entering into their case, and showing the greatest acquaintance with it.’ ‘As one of your burgesses,’ he told them, ’I stand upon the line that divides Oxford from the outer world, and as a sentinel I cry out to tell what I see from that position.’ What he saw was that if this bill were thrown out, no other half so favourable would ever again be brought in.

THE BILL FRAMED

The scheme accepted by the cabinet was in essentials Mr. Gladstone’s own. Jowett at the earliest stage sent him a comprehensive plan, and soon after, saw Lord John (Jan 6). ‘I must own,’ writes the latter to Gladstone, ’I was much struck by the clearness and completeness of his views.’ The difference between Jowett’s plan and Mr. Gladstone’s was on the highly important point of machinery. Jowett, who all his life had a weakness for getting and keeping authority into his own hands, or the hands of those whom he could influence, contended that after parliament had settled principles, Oxford itself could be trusted to settle details far better than a little body of great personages from outside, unacquainted with special wants and special interests. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, invented the idea of an executive commission with statutory powers. The two plans were printed and circulated, and the balance of opinion in the cabinet went decisively for Mr. Gladstone’s scheme. The discussion between him and Jowett, ranging over the whole field of the bill, was maintained until its actual production, in many interviews and much correspondence. In drawing the clauses Mr. Gladstone received the help of Bethell, the solicitor-general, at whose suggestion Phillimore and Thring were called in for further aid in what was undoubtedly a task of exceptional difficulty. The process brought into clearer light the truth discerned by Mr. Gladstone from the first, that the enormous number of diverse institutions that had grown up in Oxford made resort to what he called sub-legislation inevitable; that is to say, they were too complex for parliament, and could only be dealt with by delegation to executive act.

It is untrue to say that Oxford as a place of education had no influence on the mind of the country; it had immense influence, but that influence was exactly what it ought not to have been. Instead of stimulating it checked, instead of expanding it stereotyped. Even for the church it had failed to bring unity, for it was from Oxford that the opinions had sprung that seemed to be rending the church in twain. The regeneration introduced by this momentous measure has been overlaid by the strata of subsequent reforms. Enough to say that the objects obtained were the deposition of the fossils and drones, and a renovated constitution on the representative principle for the governing body; the wakening of a huge mass of sleeping endowments; the bestowal of college emoluments only on excellence tested by competition, and associated with active duties; the reorganisation or re-creation of professorial teaching; the removal of local preferences and restrictions. Beyond these aspects of reform, Mr. Gladstone was eager for the proposed right to establish private halls, as a change calculated to extend the numbers and strength of the university, and as settling the much disputed question, whether the scale of living could not be reduced, and university education brought within reach of classes of moderate means. These hopes proved to be exaggerated, but they illustrate his constant and lifelong interest in the widest possible diffusion of all good things in the world from university training down to a Cook’s tour.

Mr. Gladstone seems to have pressed his draftsmen hard, as he sometimes did. Bethell returning to him ’the disjecta membra of this unfortunate bill,’ tells him that he is too deeply attached to him to care for a few marks of impatience, and adds, ’write a few kind words to Phillimore, for he really loves you and feels this matter deeply.’ Oxford, scene of so many agitations for a score of years past, was once more seized with consternation, stupefaction, enthusiasm. A few private copies of the draft were sent down from London for criticism. On the vice-chancellor it left ‘an impression of sorrow and sad anticipations’; it opened deplorable prospects for the university, for the church, for religion, for righteousness. The dean of Christ Church thought it not merely inexpedient, but unjust and tyrannical. Jowett, on the other hand, was convinced that it must satisfy all reasonable reformers, and added emphatically in writing to Mr. Gladstone, ’It is to yourself and Lord John that the university will be indebted for the greatest boon that it has ever received.’ After the introduction of the bill by Lord John Russell, the obscurantists made a final effort to call down one of their old pelting hailstorms. A petition against the bill was submitted to convocation; happily it passed by a majority of no more than two.

SECOND READING

At length the blessed day of the second reading came. The ever zealous Arthur Stanley was present. ‘A superb speech from Gladstone,’ he records, ’in which, for the first time, all the arguments from our report were worked up in the most effective manner. He vainly endeavoured to reconcile his present with his former position. But, with this exception, I listened to his speech with the greatest delight.... To behold one’s old enemies slaughtered before one’s face with the most irresistible weapons was quite intoxicating. One great charm of his speaking is its exceeding good-humour. There is great vehemence but no bitterness.’ An excellent criticism of many, perhaps most, of his speeches.

‘It must ever be borne in mind,’ Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord John at the outset, ’with respect to our old universities that history, law, and usage with them form such a manifold, diversified, and complex mass, that it is not one subject but a world of subjects that we have to deal with in approaching them.’ And he pointed out that if any clever lawyer such as Butt or Cairns were employed to oppose the bill systematically, debate would run to such lengths as to make it hopeless. This was a point of view that Mr. Gladstone’s more exacting and abstract critics now, and many another time, forgot: they forgot that, whatever else you may say of a bill, after all it is a thing that is to be carried through parliament. Everybody had views of his own. A characteristic illustration of Mr. Gladstone’s temper in the arduous work of practical legislation to which so much of the energies of his life was devoted, is worth giving here from a letter of this date to Burgon of Oriel. Nobody answers better to the rare combination, in Bacon’s words, of a ’glorious nature that doth put life into business, with a solid and sober nature that hath as much of the ballast as of the sail’:

Sometimes it may be necessary in dealing with a very ancient institution to make terms, as it were, between such an institution and the actual spirit of the age. This may be in certain circumstances a necessary, but it can never be a satisfactory, process. It is driving a bargain, and somewhat of a wretched bargain. But I really do not find or feel that this is the case now before us. In that case, my view, right or wrong, is this: that Oxford is far behind her duties or capabilities, not because her working men work so little, but because so large a proportion of her children do not work at all, so large a proportion of her resources remains practically dormant, and her present constitution is so ill-adapted to developing her real but latent powers. What I therefore anticipate is not the weakening of her distinctive principles, not the diminution of her labour, already great, that she discharges for the church and for the land, but a great expansion, a great invigoration, a great increase of her numbers, a still greater increase of her moral force, and of her hold upon the heart and mind of the country.

ADMISSION OF DISSENTERS

Pusey seems to have talked of the university as ruined and overthrown by a parricidal hand; Oxford would be lost to the church; she would have to take refuge in colleges away from the university. Oxford had now received its death-blow from Mr. Gladstone and the government to which he belonged, and he could no longer support at election times the worker of such evil, and must return to that inactivity in things political, from which only love and confidence for Mr. Gladstone had roused him. ‘Personally,’ the good man adds, ‘I must always love you.’ To Pusey, and to all who poured reproach upon him from this side, Mr. Gladstone replied with inexhaustible patience. He never denied that parliamentary intervention was an evil, but he submitted to it in order to avert greater evil. ’If the church of England has not strength enough to keep upright, this will soon appear in the troubles of emancipated Oxford: if she has, it will come out to the joy of us all in the immensely augmented energy and power of the university for good. If Germanism and Arnoldism are now to carry the day at Oxford (I mean supposing the bill is carried into law), they will carry it fairly; let them win and wear her (God forbid, however); but if she has a heart true to the faith her hand will be stronger ten times over than it has been heretofore, in doing battle.... Nor am I saddened by the pamphlet of a certain Mr. which I have been reading to-day. It has more violence than venom, and also much more violence than strength. I often feel how hard it is on divines to be accused of treachery and baseness, because they do not, like us, get it every day and so become case-hardened against it.’

In parliament the craft laboured heavily in cross-seas. ’I have never known,’ says its pilot, ‘a measure so foolishly discussed in committee.’ Nor was oil cast upon the waters by its friends. By the end of May Mr. Gladstone and Lord John saw that they must take in canvas. At this point a new storm broke. It was impossible that a measure on such a subject could fail to awaken the ever ready quarrel between the two camps into which the English establishment, for so many generations, has so unhappily divided the life of the nation. From the first, the protestant dissenters had been extremely sore at the absence from the bill of any provision for their admission to the remodelled university. Bright, the most illustrious of them, told the House of Commons that he did not care whether so pusillanimous and tinkering an affair as this was passed or not. Dissenters, he said with scorn, are expected always to manifest too much of those inestimable qualities which are spoken of in the Epistle to the Corinthians: ’To hope all things, to believe all things, and to endure all things.’

More discredit than he deserved fell upon Mr. Gladstone for this obnoxious defect. In announcing the commission of inquiry four years before, Lord John as prime minister had expressly said that the improvement of the universities should be treated as a subject by itself, and that the admission of dissenters ought to be reserved for future and separate consideration. Writing to Mr. Gladstone (Ja he said, ‘I do not want to stir the question in this bill,’ but he would support a proposal in a separate bill by which the halls might be the means of admitting dissenters. Mr. Gladstone himself professed to take no strong line either way; but in a parliamentary case of this kind to take no line is not materially different from a line in effect unfriendly. Arthur Stanley pressed him as hard as he could. ’Justice to the university,’ said Mr. Gladstone in reply, ’demands that it should be allowed to consider the question for itself.... Indeed, while I believe that the admission of dissenters without the breaking up of the religious teaching and the government of the university would be a great good, I am also of opinion that to give effect to that measure by forcible intervention of parliament would be a great evil. Whether it is an evil that must some day or other be encountered, the time has not yet, I think, arrived for determining.’ The letter concludes with a remark of curious bearing upon the temper of that age. ‘The very words,’ he says to Stanley, ’which you have let fall upon your paper “Roman catholics” used in this connection, were enough to burn it through and through, considering we have a parliament which, were the measure of 1829 not law at this moment, would I think probably refuse to make it law.’ There is no reason to think this an erroneous view. Perhaps it would not be extravagant even to-day.

What Mr. Gladstone called ‘the evil of parliamentary interference’ did not tarry, and on the report stage of the bill, a clause removing the theological test at matriculation was carried (June 22) against the government by ninety-one. The size of the majority and the diversified material of which it was composed left the government no option but to yield. ’Parliament having now unhappily determined to legislate upon the subject,’ Mr. Gladstone writes to the provost of Oriel, ’it seems to me, I may add it seems to my colleagues, best for the interests of the university that we should now make some endeavour to settle the whole question and so preclude, if we can, any pretext for renewed agitation.’ ‘The basis of that settlement,’ he went on in a formula which he tenaciously reiterated to all his correspondents, and which is a landmark in the long history of his dealing with the question, ’should be that the whole teaching and governing function in the university and in the colleges, halls, and private halls, should be retained, as now, in the church of England, but that everything outside the governing and teaching functions, whether in the way of degrees, honours, or emoluments, should be left open.’ The new clause he described as ’one of those incomplete arrangements that seem to suit the practical habits of this country, and which by taking the edge off a matter of complaint, are often found virtually to dispose of it for a length of time.’ In the end the church of England test was removed, not only on admission to the university, but from the bachelor’s degree. Tests in other forms remained, as we shall in good time perceive. ‘We have proceeded,’ Mr. Gladstone wrote, ’in the full belief that the means of applying a church test to fellowships in colleges are clear and ample.’ So they were, and so remained, until seventeen years later in the life of an administration of his own the obnoxious fetter was struck off.

MR. DISRAELI ON THE BILL

The debates did not close without at least one characteristic masterpiece from Mr. Disraeli. He had not taken a division on the second reading, but he executed with entire gravity all the regulation manoeuvres of opposition, and his appearance on the page of Hansard relieves a dull discussion. If government, he asked, could defer a reform of the constitution (referring to the withdrawal of Lord John’s bill) why should they hurry to reform the universities? The talk about the erudite professors of Germany as so superior to Oxford was nonsense. The great men of Germany became professors only because they could not become members of parliament. ’We, on the contrary, are a nation of action, and you may depend upon it, that though you may give an Oxford professor two thousand a year instead of two hundred, still ambition in England will look to public life and to the House of Commons, and not to professors’ chairs.’ The moment the revolution of 1848 gave the German professors a chance, see how they rushed into political conventions and grasped administrative offices. Again, the principle of the bill was the laying of an unhallowed hand upon the ark of the universities, and wore in effect the hideous aspect of the never-to-be-forgotten appropriation clause. If he were asked whether he would rather have Oxford free with all its imperfections, or an Oxford without imperfections but under the control of the government, he would reply, ’Give me Oxford free and independent, with all its anomalies and imperfections.’ An excellently worded but amusingly irrelevant passage about Voltaire and Rousseau, and the land that was enlightened by the one and inflamed by the other, brought the curious performance to a solemn close. High fantastic trifling of this sort, though it may divert a later generation to whose legislative bills it can do no harm, helps to explain the deep disfavour with which Disraeli was regarded by his severe and strenuous opponent.

‘The admiration of posterity,’ Dr. Jeune wrote to Mr. Gladstone, ’would be greatly increased if men hereafter could know what wisdom, what firmness, what temper, what labour your success has required.’ More than this, it was notorious that Mr. Gladstone was bravely risking his seat. This side of the matter Jeune made plain to him. ’Had I foreseen in 1847,’ replied Mr. Gladstone (Broadstairs, Aug 26, 1854), ’that church controversies which I then hoped were on the decline, were really about to assume a fiercer glare and a wider range than they had done before, I should not have been presumptuous enough to face the contingencies of such a seat at such a time.’ As things stood he was bound to hold on. With dauntless confidence that never failed him, he was convinced that no long time would suffice to scatter the bugbears, and the bill would be nothing but a source of strength to any one standing in reputed connection with it. To Dr. Jeune when the battle was over he expresses ’his warm sense of the great encouragement and solid advantage which at every stage he had derived from his singularly ready and able help.’ To Jowett and Goldwin Smith he acknowledged a hardly lower degree of obligation. The last twenty years, wrote a shrewd and expert sage in 1866, ’have seen more improvement in the temper and teaching of Oxford than the three centuries since the Reformation. This has undoubtedly been vastly promoted by the Reform bill of 1854, or at least by one enactment in it, the abolition of close fellowships, which has done more for us than all the other enactments of the measure put together.’ ‘The indirect effects,’ says the same writer in words of pregnant praise, ’in stimulating the spirit of improvement among us, have been no less important than the specific reforms enacted by it.’

III

ANOTHER FAR-REACHING CHANGE

Another of the most far-reaching changes of this era of reform affected the civil service. J. S. Mill, then himself an official at the India House, did not hesitate ’to hail the plan of throwing open the civil service to competition as one of the greatest improvements in public affairs ever proposed by a government.’ On the system then reigning, civil employment under the crown was in all the offices the result of patronage, though in some, and those not the more important of them, nominees were partially tested by qualifying examination and periods of probation. The eminent men who held what were called the staff appointments in the service the Merivales, Taylors, Farrers were introduced from without, with the obvious implication that either the civil service trained up within its own ranks a poor breed, or else that the meritorious men were discouraged and kept back by the sight of prizes falling to outsiders. Mr. Gladstone was not slow to point out that the existing system if it brought eminent men in, had driven men like Manning and Spedding out. What patronage meant is forcibly described in a private memorandum of a leading reformer, preserved by Mr. Gladstone among his papers on this subject. ’The existing corps of civil servants,’ says the writer, ’do not like the new plan, because the introduction of well-educated, active men, will force them to bestir themselves, and because they cannot hope to get their own ill-educated sons appointed under the new system. The old established political families habitually batten on the public patronage their sons legitimate and illegitimate, their relatives and dependents of every degree, are provided for by the score. Besides the adventuring disreputable class of members of parliament, who make God knows what use of the patronage, a large number of borough members are mainly dependent upon it for their seats. What, for instance, are the members to do who have been sent down by the patronage secretary to contest boroughs in the interest of the government, and who are pledged twenty deep to their constituents?’

The foreign office had undergone, some years before, a thorough reconstruction by Lord Palmerston, who, though very cool to constitutional reform, was assiduous and exacting in the forms of public business, not least so in the vital matter of a strong, plain, bold handwriting. Revision had been attempted in various departments before Mr. Gladstone went to the exchequer, and a spirit of improvement was in the air. Lowe, beginning his official career as one of the secretaries of the board of control, had procured the insertion in the India bill of 1853 of a provision throwing open the great service of India to competition for all British-born subjects, and he was a vigorous advocate of a general extension of the principle. It was the conditions common to all the public establishments that called for revision, and the foundations for reform were laid in a report by Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan (November 1853), prepared for Mr. Gladstone at his request, recommending two propositions, so familiarised to us to-day as to seem like primordial elements of the British constitution. One was, that access to the public service should be through the door of a competitive examination; the other, that for conducting these examinations a central board should be constituted. The effect of such a change has been enormous not only on the efficiency of the service, but on the education of the country, and by a thousand indirect influences, raising and strengthening the social feeling for the immortal maxim that the career should be open to the talents. The lazy doctrine that men are much of a muchness gave way to a higher respect for merit and to more effectual standards of competency.

OLD SYSTEM AND NEW

The reform was not achieved without a battle. The whole case was argued by Mr. Gladstone in a letter to Lord John Russell of incomparable trenchancy and force, one of the best specimens of the writer at his best, and only not worth reproducing here, because the case has long been finished. Lord John (Jan 20) wrote to him curtly in reply, ’I hope no change will be made, and I certainly must protest against it.’ In reply to even a second assault, he remained quite unconvinced. At present, he said, the Queen appointed the ministers, and the ministers the subordinates; in future the board of examiners would be in the place of the Queen. Our institutions would be as nearly republican as possible, and the new spirit of the public offices would not be loyalty but republicanism! As one of Lord John’s kindred spirits declared, ’The more the civil service is recruited from the lower classes, the less will it be sought after by the higher, until at last the aristocracy will be altogether dissociated from the permanent civil service of the country.’ How could the country go on with a democratic civil service by the side of an aristocratic legislature? This was just the spirit that Mr. Gladstone loathed. To Graham he wrote (Jan 3, 1854), ’I do not want any pledges as to details; what I seek is your countenance and favour in an endeavour to introduce to the cabinet a proposal that we should give our sanction to the principle that in every case where a satisfactory test of a defined and palpable nature can be furnished, the public service shall be laid open to personal merit.... This is my contribution to parliamentary reform.’ On January 26 (1854) the cabinet was chiefly occupied by Mr. Gladstone’s proposition, and after a long discussion his plan was adopted. When reformers more ardent than accurate insisted in later years that it was the aristocracy who kept patronage, Mr. Gladstone reminded the House, ’No cabinet could have been more aristocratically composed than that over which Lord Aberdeen presided. I myself was the only one of fifteen noblemen and gentlemen who composed it, who could not fairly be said to belong to that class.’ Yet it was this cabinet that conceived and matured a plan for the surrender of all its patronage. There for the moment, in spite of all his vigour and resolution, the reform was arrested. Time did not change him. In November he wrote to Trevelyan: ’My own opinions are more and more in favour of the plan of competition. I do not mean that they can be more in its favour as a principle, than they were when I invited you and Northcote to write the report which has lit up the flame; but more and more do the incidental evils seem curable and the difficulties removable.’ As the Crimean war went on, the usual cry for administrative reform was raised, and Mr. Gladstone never made a more terse, pithy, and incontrovertible speech than his defence for an open civil service in the summer of 1855.

For this branch of reform, too, the inspiration had proceeded from Oxford. Two of the foremost champions of the change had been Temple afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury and Jowett. The latter was described by Mr. Gladstone to Graham as being ’as handy a workman as you shall readily find,’ and in the beginning of 1855 he proposed to these two reformers that they should take the salaried office of examiners under the civil service scheme. Much of his confident expectation of good, he told them, was built upon their co-operation. In all his proceedings on this subject, Mr. Gladstone showed in strong light in how unique a degree he combined a profound democratic instinct with the spirit of good government; the instinct of popular equality along with the scientific spirit of the enlightened bureaucrat.