We must meanwhile cease to treat the existing system of competition by the hasty writing of answers to unexpected examination questions as an unchangeable entity.  That system has certain very real advantages.  It is felt by the candidates and their relations to be ‘fair.’  It reveals facts about the relative powers of the candidates in some important intellectual qualities which no testimonials would indicate, and which are often unknown, till tested, to the candidates themselves.  But if the sphere of independent selection is to be widely extended, greater variety must be introduced into its methods.  In this respect invention has stood still in England since the publication of Sir Charles Trevelyan’s Report in 1855.  Some slight modifications have taken place in the subjects chosen for examination, but the enormous changes in English educational conditions during the last half century have been for the most part ignored.  It is still assumed that young Englishmen consist of a small minority who have received the nearly uniform ‘education of a gentleman,’ and a large majority who have received no intellectual training at all.  The spread of varied types of secondary schools, the increasing specialisation of higher education, and the experience which all the universities of the world have accumulated as to the possibility of testing the genuineness and intellectual quality of ‘post graduate’ theses have had little or no effect.

The Playfair Commission of 1875 found that a few women were employed for strictly subordinate work in the Post Office.  Since then female typewriters and a few better-paid women have been introduced into other offices in accordance with the casual impulses of this or that parliamentary or permanent chief; but no systematic attempt has been made to enrich the thinking power of the State by using the trained and patient intellects of the women who graduate each year in the newer, and ‘qualify by examination to graduate,’ in the older Universities.

To the general public indeed, the adoption of open competition in 1870 seemed to obviate any necessity for further consideration not only of the method by which officials were appointed but also of the system under which they did their work.  The race of Tite Barnacles, they learnt, was now to become extinct.  Appointment was to be by ‘merit,’ and the announcement of the examination results, like the wedding in a middle-Victorian novel, was to be the end of the story.  But in a Government office, as certainly as in a law-court or a laboratory, effective thinking will not be done unless adequate opportunities and motives are secured by organisation during the whole working life of the appointed officials.  Since 1870, however, the organisation of the Government Departments has either been left to the casual development of office tradition in each Department or has been changed (as in the case of the War Office) by an agitation directed against one Department only.  The official