[89] Ibid., p. 78

[90] Life of Queen Victoria, vol. iii. p. 377 (July 29, 1858).

In 1870, however, sixteen years after Trevelyan’s Report, Gladstone established open competition throughout the English Civil Service, by an Order in Council which was practically uncriticised and unopposed; and the parliamentary government of England in one of its most important functions did in fact reduce itself ‘to a mere signing machine.’

The causes of the change in the political atmosphere which made this possible constitute one of the most interesting problems in English history.  One cause is obvious.  In 1867 Lord Derby’s Reform Act had suddenly transferred the ultimate control of the House of Commons from the ‘ten pound householders’ in the boroughs to the working men.  The old ‘governing classes’ may well have felt that the patronage which they could not much longer retain would be safer in the hands of an independent Civil Service Commission, interpreting, like a blinded figure of Justice, the verdict of Nature, than in those of the dreaded ‘caucuses,’ which Mr. Schnadhorst was already organising.

But one seems to detect a deeper cause of change than the mere transference of voting power.  The fifteen years from the Crimean War to 1870 were in England a period of wide mental activity, during which the conclusions of a few penetrating thinkers like Darwin or Newman were discussed and popularised by a crowd of magazine writers and preachers and poets.  The conception was gaining ground that it was upon serious and continued thought and not upon opinion that the power to carry out our purposes, whether in politics or elsewhere, must ultimately depend.

Carlyle in 1850 had asked whether ’democracy once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such-like, will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real,’ and had answered, ’Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting.  The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner:  the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote.  If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain those conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape:  if you cannot—­the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again.’[91]

[91] Latter Day Pamphlets, No.  I, The Present Time. (Chapman and Hall, 1894, pp. 12 and 14.)

By 1870 Carlyle’s lesson was already well started on its course from paradox to platitude.  The most important single influence in that course had been the growth of Natural Science.  It was, for instance, in 1870 that Huxley’s Lay Sermons were collected and published.  People who could not in 1850 understand Carlyle’s distinction between the Delusive and the Eeal, could not help understanding Huxley’s comparison of life and death to a game of chess with an unseen opponent who never makes a mistake.[92] And Huxley’s impersonal Science seemed a more present aid in the voyage round Cape Horn than Carlyle’s personal and impossible Hero.