The real ‘Second Chamber,’ the real ‘constitutional check’ in England, is provided, not by the House of Lords or the Monarchy, but by the existence of a permanent Civil Service, appointed on a system independent of the opinion or desires of any politician, and holding office during good behaviour.  If such a service were, as it is in Russia and to a large extent in India, a sovereign power, it would itself, as I argued in the last chapter, have to cultivate the art of manipulating opinion.  But the English Civil servants in their present position have the right and duty of making their voice heard, without the necessity of making their will, by fair means or foul, prevail.

The creation of this Service was the one great political invention in nineteenth-century England, and like other inventions it was worked out under the pressure of an urgent practical problem.  The method of appointing the officials of the East India Company had been a critical question in English politics since 1783.  By that time it had already become clear that we could not permanently allow the appointment of the rulers of a great empire kept in existence by the English fleet and army to depend upon the irresponsible favour of the Company’s directors.  Charles James Fox in 1783, with his usual heedlessness, proposed to cut the knot, by making Indian appointments, in effect, part of the ordinary system of parliamentary patronage; and he and Lord North were beaten over their India Bill, not only because George the Third was obstinate and unscrupulous, but because men felt the enormous political dangers involved in their proposal.  The question, in fact, could only be solved by a new invention.  The expedient of administering an oath to the Directors that they would make their appointments honestly, proved to be useless, and the requirements that the nominees of the Directors should submit to a special training at Hayleybury, though more effective, left the main evil of patronage untouched.

As early, therefore, as 1833, the Government Bill introduced by Macaulay for the renewal and revision of the Company’s charter contained a clause providing that East India cadetships should be thrown open to competition.[86] For the time the influence of the Directors was sufficient to prevent so great a change from being effected, but in 1853, on a further renewal of the Charter, the system of competition was definitely adopted, and the first open examination for cadetships took place in 1855.

[86] It would be interesting if Lord Morley, now that he has access to the records of the East India House, would tell us the true intellectual history of this far-reaching suggestion.  For the facts as now known, cf.  A.L.  Lowell, Colonial Civil Service, pp. 243-256.