[92] Lay Sermont, p. 31, ‘A Liberal Education’ (1868).

But the invention of a competitive Civil Service, when it had once been made and adopted, dropped from the region of severe and difficult thought in which it originated, and took its place in our habitual political psychology.  We now half-consciously conceive of the Civil Service as an unchanging fact whose good and bad points are to be taken or left as a whole.  Open competition has by the same process become a principle, conceived of as applying to those cases to which it has been in fact applied, and to no others.  What is therefore for the moment most needed, if we are to think fruitfully on the subject, is that we should in our own minds break up this fact, and return to the world of infinite possible variations.  We must think of the expedient of competition itself as varying in a thousand different directions, and shading by imperceptible gradations into other methods of appointment; and of the posts offered for competition as differing each from all the rest, as overlapping those posts for which competition in some form is suitable though it has not yet been tried, and as touching, at the marginal point on their curve, those posts for which competition is unsuitable.

Directly we begin this process one fact becomes obvious.  There is no reason why the same system should not be applied to the appointment of the officials of the local as to those of the central government.  It is an amazing instance of the intellectual inertia of the English people that we have never seriously considered this point.  In America the term Civil Service is applied equally to both groups of offices, and ’Civil Service principles’ are understood to cover State and Municipal as well as Federal appointments.  The separation of the two systems in our minds may, indeed, be largely due to the mere accident that from historical reasons we call them by different names.  As it is, the local authorities are (with the exception that certain qualifications are required for teachers and medical officers) left free to do as they will in making appointments.  Perhaps half a dozen Metropolitan and provincial local bodies have adopted timid and limited schemes of open competition.  But in all other cases the local civil servants, who are already probably as numerous as those of the central government,[93] are appointed under conditions which, if the Government chose to create a Commission of Inquiry, would probably be found to have reproduced many of the evils that existed in the patronage of the central government before 1855.

[93] The figures in the census of 1901 were—­National, 90,000; Local, 71,000.  But the local officials since then have, I believe, increased much more rapidly than the national.

It would not, of course, be possible to appoint a separate body of Civil Service Commissioners to hold a separate examination for each locality, and difficulties would arise from the selection of officials by a body responsible only to the central government, and out of touch with the local body which controls, pays, and promotes them when appointed.  But similar difficulties have been obviated by American Civil Service Reformers, and a few days’ hard thinking would suffice to adapt the system to English local conditions.