We are sometimes told, now that good education is open to every one, that men of every kind of social origin and class sympathy will enter to an increasing extent the higher Civil Service.  If that takes place it will be an excellent thing, but meanwhile any one who follows the development of the existing examination system knows that care is required to guard against the danger that preference in marking may, if only from official tradition, be given to subjects like Greek and Latin composition, whose educational value is not higher than others, but excellence in which is hardly ever acquired except by members of one social class.

It would, of course, be ruinous to sacrifice intellectual efficiency to the dogma of promotion from the ranks, and the statesmen of 1870 were perhaps right in thinking that promotion from the second to the first division of the service would be in their time so rare as to be negligible.  But things have changed since then.  The competition for the second division has become incomparably more severe, and there is no reasonable test under which some of those second class officials who have continued their education by means of reading and University teaching in the evening would not show, at thirty years of age, a greater fitness for the highest work than would be shown by many of those who had entered by the more advanced examination.

But however able our officials are, and however varied their origin, the danger of the narrowness and rigidity which has hitherto so generally resulted from official life would still remain, and must be guarded against by every kind of encouragement to free intellectual development.  The German Emperor did good service the other day when he claimed (in a semi-official communication on the Tweedmouth letter) that the persons who are Kings and Ministers in their official capacity have as Fachmaenner (experts) other and wider rights in the republic of thought.  One only wishes that he would allow his own officials after their day’s work to regroup themselves, in the healthy London fashion, with labour leaders, and colonels, and schoolmasters, and court ladies, and members of parliament, as individualists or socialists, or protectors of African aborigines, or theosophists, or advocates of a free stage or a free ritual.

The intellectual life of the government official is indeed becoming part of a problem which every year touches us all more closely.  In literature and science as well as in commerce and industry the independent producer is dying out and the official is taking his place.  We are nearly all of us officials now, bound during our working days, whether we write on a newspaper, or teach in a university, or keep accounts in a bank, by restrictions on our personal freedom in the interest of a larger organisation.  We are little influenced by that direct and obvious economic motive which drives a small shopkeeper or farmer or country solicitor to a desperate intensity of scheming how to outstrip his rivals or make more profit out of his employees.  If we merely desire to do as little work and enjoy as much leisure as possible in our lives, we all find that it pays us to adopt that steady unanxious ‘stroke’ which neither advances nor retards promotion.