with the lustre of repeated failures upon them? They have lost, or well-nigh lost, the best years of their life; they must begin again, when too late to commence a new career with any prospect of success. They may have enfeebled their health, and paralysed their energies by overexertion, and destroyed the elasticity of their minds by repeated disappointments. What is to become of this mass of disheartened adolescence? Can anything be less advantageous to the community at large than thus to encourage parents to train up their boys, before their characters are formed, to "go in" for a particular class of examination, in which failure is far more probable than success, and success only a problematical benefit? Yet this encouragement is now largely given, and the Autocrat of Cram is lording it over the middle classes. What we may expect soon is a terrible reaction. People will in due time be frightened by the numerous failures brought to their notice, and there will be as great a disinclination as there now is willingness on the part of the public to compete for official appointments. Youths of high promise will not be suffered to tarnish their reputations by failures of this kind. The class of competitors will, therefore, deteriorate as their numbers diminish; and the advocates of the competition scheme will find it deficient in the very merits which they have most emphatically claimed for it. Indeed, we begin already to hear parents protesting that they will not expose their sons to the chance of disappointment, and consequent depreciation; that they will not incur the risk of tarnishing the dawning reputation of a promising youth, by sending him up to compete with a multitude, among whom may be many of inferior talents and qualifications, to whom some accident may give an advantage in the struggle. The greater the capacity, the more hopeful the prospects of the boy, the more unwilling will the parent be to expose him to the possibility of a defeat which will mortify and dishearten him, and may perhaps so blight his young energies that they

will never again recover their former strength and elasticity.

Moreover, unless we are greatly mistaken, this now dominant competitive system will fail to secure for the public service not only the talent but the respectability also of the country. We confess that we think this matter of the social status of Government employés one not to be lightly regarded. A man may not be a more efficient public servant for being what is called "highly connected;" but the general tone of the Public Service is elevated by this high connection; and we acknowledge to the weakness of desiring to see our public offices stocked with gentlemen. It is common to represent the more aristocratic employés of Government as men indolent in the extreme, and haughty beyond endurance; but, like many popular notions, it is a mere delusion-the fact being simply this, that your true aristocrat is always courteous, and that hauteur is the distinguishing mark of the novus homo, who, having no intrinsic importance, wears his robes of office jauntily, and thunders from the bureaucratic chair. We cannot think, indeed, that the outside Public would have their business done better if young men of good family connec tions were excluded by the general application of the competition principle from our public offices; and that such exclusion will be the result it needs no great acumen to foresee. The competition will, for the most part, be among men who have no family interest, and who go in for a place in the Public Service because they have no prospects in any other direction. The field will in time be left clear to these men, and Government employment will become a sort of refuge for the desti

tute.

It must be remembered-and we shall dwell a little upon the point; for on looking back at what we have written, we find that we have not yet sufficiently insisted upon it-that the inducements to enter the Public Service are not great. The one great advantage of employment of this kind is its certainty. When we have said this, we have said everything in its favour. There is a

yielded to, until entrance into the service of the State can only be obtained by competition against the whole country. But we have shown that there is not so much justice as some suppose in throwing open the Public Service; that the system necessarily inflicts considerable hardship upon men who have deserved well of their country; and that the public business is not likely to be better done than under the old nomination system. We anticipate a great deterioration, instead of amelioration of the Public Service, as the result of this

concession to popular clamour; and we are content to await patiently the fulfilment of our prediction. Te new system, which is now on its tris), is plausible and popular; but many things which are plausible and popular are not wise; and a system, the tendency of which is to destroy the muscle of the Public Service, can never be beneficial to the country. That service is, doubtless, capable of improvement; but improvement, to be effectual, must be gradual. We only accomplish crude innovations when we rush into violent extremes.

A YEAR has run its round, and something more, since last I addressed you from Turin. No uneventful year, indeed. The political atmosphere here, comparatively unclouded twelve months ago, has lately been storm laden. Europe has been startled by a martial challenge, and on seeking whence the trumpetnotes, so boldly sounded, proceeded, her gaze was presently fixed on Piedmont. The horn of discord, which has made the Continent bristle with bayonets, which has paralysed commerce and industry, and impoverished whole classes in great empires, has been winded by a petty power in Northern Italy.

Suffer me to take a retrospective glance. Of recent events and signs of the times in this country, it is probable that few of your readers are uninformed, but many may not be sorry to refresh their memories by the perusal of a concise sketch of the circumstances that preceded or led to them. It is not necessary to go farther back than to that Congress held at Paris in which the Piedmont were allowed to take their places on an equality with the plenipotentiaries of the great European powers, as a reward for the share-honourable, although small-that their country had taken in the war then just terminated. The alliance of Sardinia with England, France, and Turkey,

representatives

TURIN, April 16, 1859. against Russia, was mainly the work of Lord Palmerston, to whom, for many other reasons besides that, is the present critical state of affairs to be imputed, more than to any other Englishman. It was justly consid ered an excellent stroke of policy on the part of the Sardinian Government, to which it gave a prestige and weight that could hardly have been attained by any other means - to which it also afforded an opportunity of pleading the cause not only of Piedmont, but of Italy. This might and ought to have been foreseen. The tendency of Piedmont to stand forward as the champion of the illgoverned and oppressed Italian countries was well known if the British Government of the day had no intention of backing those claims, it was certainly unwise to place their chief supporter in a position favourable for pressing them, and for enlisting sympathies in their behalf. The thing, however, was done. Lord Palmerston, who for years had taken pleasure in raising the hopes of Italy, afterwards to dash them to the dust, was well pleased to get Sardinia's fifteen thousand men; and the war at an end, an energetic, shrewd,

:

and resolute Piedmontese statesman, Count Camillo Cavour, took his seat in the Congress on behalf of the King his master. On behalf, too, of all Italy. When be entered the assembly where he found his deadly politi.

cal foe, Count Buol-Schauenstein, and the most eminent statesmen and diplomatists of England, France, Prussia, Russia, and Turkey, it was with the determination to fulfil a double mission. With his colleagues he had to arrange the conditions of peace and the future position of the Ottoman Empire; but his other object, much nearer to his heart, was to call the attention of Europe to the state of Italy, and to endeavour to obtain redress of her grievances and a diminution of her sufferings. He did not then pretend to a tearing-up of treaties, and to the expulsion of Austria from Italy; on the contrary, he based his arguments on the treaties of 1815, whose violation he imputed to the former power. He particularly addressed himself to the representatives of England and France, by whom he was favourably received; and notwithstanding the refusal of the Austrian minister to discuss the subject, the difficult complications of Italian affairs received some attention, although no sort of solution, from the Congress. Lord Clarendon declared the state of things in Italy irregular, and to be regretted; he particularly referred to the occupation by foreign troops of various points of the peninsula, as one which ought to be put an end to by the removal of the causes that rendered the presence of those forces necessary. He pointed out what those causes were, denounced the mal-administration of the Papal Government, recommended its secularisation, especially in the Legations, as the best means, combined with the formation of a national armed force, of enabling it to dispense with Austrian armies. Notwithstanding his declaration that he was unauthorised to discuss Italian affairs, Count Buol could not entirely abstain from joining in the conversation, and, with reference to Austrian interference in some of the minor Italian States, he declared that one power had a right to interfere in the internal affairs of another country when called upon to do so by the legitimate government of the latter. This doctrine was strongly combated by Lord Clarendon, who, according to Count Cayour's positive statement in the

Sardinian Chamber a few days after the termination of the conferences, displayed the greatest sympathy for Italy, and the most earnest desire to relieve her from the evils that afflicted her. The Sardinian plenipotentiaries admitted that the evacuation of Italy by foreign troops might lead to deplorable consequences, but urged that this danger would be obviated by the previous adoption of certain suitable measures. Thereupon they were invited to state their views, and on the 16th April 1856 they addressed a note upon the subject to Lord Clarendon and Count Walewski. They had hoped, they said, that the Paris Congress would not have separated without taking the state of Italy into serious consideration, and that the sympathy shown with the Greek Christians of the East would have been extended to the suffering Latin race of the peninsula. Disappointed in this expectation, in consequence of the persistence of Austria in restricting the discussions of the Congress within the limits laid down before its opening, they addressed themselves to their allies, denouncing the system of compression and reaction maintained ever since 1848-9. The rigour which the revolutionary troubles of that period might have justified in its commencement, had been increased, instead of lessened, by the lapse of time; proscriptions, imprisonments, police persecutions, and state of siege sufficiently proved this; and such means of government kept the Italians in a state of constant irritation and revolutionary ferment. Latterly these had somewhat calmed down. On beholding a popular Italian prince closely united with the Western powers in amity and arms, and sustaining the principles of right and justice in the East, the people of Italy had conceived hopes that peace would not be concluded without something being done for them. They took patience and waited. But, said the note, when they shall know the negative result of the Congress of Paris as far as they are concerned, and that Austria has refused to lend herself to the examination of their grievances, the irritation that

their race. If a young man, on his first arrival in India, was received into the house of his father or his elder brother, it was an incalculable advantage to him, in a public no less than in a private sense; but even if no such advantage were enjoyed by him, the traditions and associations by which he was surrounded made him a better public servant. The natives of the country liked him better, and respected him more. They clung to the old hereditary names, and confided in the men who bore them. But they have no faith in the new men of the competition system. We have heard-and if true, it is a significant fact that the native money-lenders of Calcutta charge the young civilians of the new school three or four per cent more in the way of interest for money advanced than they exact from the hereditary placemen who went out from Haileybury under the old nomina tion system. They look upon the new men as belonging altogether to a different and a lower caste. They are not the Brahmins of the public service. It is felt that they do not carry with them the guarantee of an accredited lineage. The same feeling that actuates the money-lender, inspires men in other relations of life. They feel that there is no guarantee for the public good conduct and competency of the new men, any more than for their personal honesty and competency in matters of business. There is no name, honoured in the public service of India, to vouch for them-no name, the dignity of which is to be supported; and therefore they are not only less respected by others, but less respected by themselves.

We do not say that this fact has been lost sight of by the advocates of the competition system, for in all probability the majority have never been cognisant of its existence. But it is a very important one, nevertheless, and greatly to be held in remembrance by all who would now endeavour still further to generalise the public service in India. The Indian Civil Service, we repeat, will henceforth be officered by a totally different race of men; and if, as appears only too probable, a consider

able reduction of official salaries follows close upon the abandonment of the service to public competition, it needs no great amount of acumen to perceive that the appointments will be competed for by men of inferior social position and general attainments. Say what we may about the advantages of the Indian Service, people will look askance at it. They prefer a humbler position and a smaller income in England. The competition for the Indian Civil Service is by no means brisk, though all our professions are overstocked; and there is really no competition for the Indian Medical Service, although the medical profession at home is more overstocked than any. To diminish the salaries of any of the competition services would necessarily be to attract to them an inferior order of fitness and capacity: it is strenuously, therefore, to be deprecated. If, as we apprehended, the character of the Indian Civil Service is already deteriorated, what is it likely to become when its emoluments are greatly reduced? We are by no means sure that, under the new system, a higher order of literary merit will be permanently secured to the service. But even if it be demonstrated that the competition system must draft into it men of greater abilities and more extensive learning, it does not follow that therefore they will be better fitted to perform the particular duties required from them. What we have now to say on this subject is, for reasons stated above, especially applicable to the Indian Service, which is of a peculiar and exceptional character; but it applies to public service of all kinds, and we desire it to be considered in its general, not its particular, acceptation. Every year the principle of competition is brought into more extensive operation, and soon there will not be a place in the public service not determinable by the number of "marks."

If this system insured the stocking of the public service with the best men obtainable for the performance of the required duties, we might overlook the hardship which it necessarily entails on those who fairly consider that they have a better right