In the meantime Sir Charles Trevelyan, a distinguished Indian Civilian who had married Macaulay’s sister, had been asked to inquire, with the help of Sir Stafford Northcote, into the method of appointment in the Home Civil Service.  His report appeared in the spring of 1854,[87] and is one of the ablest of those State Papers which have done so much to mould the English constitution during the last two generations.  It showed the intolerable effects on the personnel of the existing Service of the system by which the Patronage Secretary of the Treasury distributed appointments in the national Civil Service among those members of parliament whose votes were to be influenced or rewarded, and it proposed that all posts requiring intellectual qualifications should be thrown open to those young men of good character who succeeded at a competitive examination in the subjects which then constituted the education of a gentleman.

[87] Reports and Papers on the Civil Service, 1854-5.

But to propose that members of parliament should give up their own patronage was a very different thing from asking them to take away the patronage of the East India Company.  Sir Charles Trevelyan, therefore, before publishing his proposal, sent it round to a number of distinguished persons both inside and outside the Government service, and printed their very frank replies in an appendix.

Most of his correspondents thought that the idea was hopelessly impracticable.  It seemed like the intrusion into the world of politics of a scheme of cause and effect derived from another universe—­as if one should propose to the Stock Exchange that the day’s prices should be fixed by prayer and the casting of lots.  Lingen, for instance, the permanent head of the Education Office, wrote considering that, as matter of fact, patronage is one element of power, and not by any means an unreal one; considering the long and inestimably valuable habituation of the people of this country to political contests in which the share of office ... reckons among the legitimate prizes of war; considering that socially and in the business of life, as well as in Downing Street, rank and wealth (as a fact, and whether we like it or not) hold the keys of many things, and that our modes of thinking and acting proceed, in a thousand ways, upon this supposition, considering all these things, I should hesitate long before I advised such a revolution of the Civil Service as that proposed by yourself and Sir Stafford Northcote.’[88] Sir James Stephen of the Colonial Office put it more bluntly, ’The world we live in is not, I think, half moralised enough for the acceptance of such a scheme of stern morality as this.’[89] When, a few years later, competition for commissions in the Indian army was discussed, Queen Victoria (or Prince Albert through her) objected that it reduced the sovereign to a mere signing machine.’[90]

[88] Reports and Papers on the Civil Service, pp. 104, 105.