One object aimed at by the creation of a competitive Civil Service for the central government in England was the prevention of corruption.  It was made more difficult for representatives and officials to conspire together in order to defraud the public, when the official ceased to owe his appointment to the representative.  If an English member of parliament desired now to make money out of his position, he would have to corrupt a whole series of officials in no way dependent on his favour, who perhaps intensely dislike the human type to which he belongs, and who would be condemned to disgrace or imprisonment years after he had lost his seat if some record of their joint misdoing were unearthed.

This precaution against corruption is needed even more clearly under the conditions of local government.  The expenditure of local bodies in the United Kingdom is already much larger than that of the central State, and is increasing at an enormously greater rate, while the fact that most of the money is spent locally, and in comparatively small sums, makes fraud easier.  English municipal life is, I believe, on the whole pure, but fraud does occur, and it is encouraged by the close connection that may exist between the officials and the representatives.  A needy or thick-skinned urban councillor or guardian may at any moment tempt, or be tempted, by a poor relation who helped him at his election, and for whom (perhaps as the result of a tacit understanding that similar favours should be allowed to his colleagues), he obtained a municipal post.

The railway companies, again, in England are coming every year more and more under State control, but no statesman has ever attempted to secure in their case, as was done in the case of the East India Company a century ago, some reasonable standard of purity and impartiality in appointments and promotion.  Some few railways have systems of competition for boy clerks, even more inadequate than those carried on by municipalities; but one is told that under most of the companies both appointment and promotion may be influenced by the favour of directors or large shareholders.  We regulate the minutiae of coupling and signalling on the railways, but do not realise that the safety of the public depends even more directly upon their systems of patronage.

How far this principle should be extended, and how far, for instance, it would be possible to prevent the head of a great private firm from ruining half a country side by leaving the management of his business to a hopelessly incompetent relation, is a question which depends, among other things, upon the powers of political invention which may be developed by collectivist thinkers in the next fifty years.