16. THE CIVIL SERVICE. The present organization of the English Civil Service may be said to have originated in the appointment by Order in Council in 1855 of a Civil Service Commission sufficiently strong and independent to check in some degree the then existing abuses of Parliamentary patronage.
In the earlier years of the reign of George III the king had kept patronage in his own hands, and had used it with the single view of increasing his personal power. Edmund Burke's reform of the Civil List (1782) brought in a new and more permanent organization of the government offices, which made royal pres sure on the "placemen" more difficult. In 1809 a Superannuation Act had the practical effect of giving civil servants the right to hold their office during good behavior. From 1810 they were paid by salary instead of by fees, and from 1816 the salaries of many posts were provided by a Parliamentary grant. By this time the royal power was exercised by the cabinet ministers, and they, through the "Pat ronage Secretary to the Treasury," who acted (and still acts) as Parliamentary °whip," avowedly used their patronage on the nomina tion of individual members of Parliament as a means of keeping together a majority in the House of Commons. Lord John Russell, in his 'History of English Government and Constitu tion' 1823 (page 402), speaks of Parliamentary patronage as being "of late years more com pletely organized." The legislation which followed the Reform Bill of 1832 increased the number and import ance of civil service posts, while the growth of the railway system and of other forms of joint stock enterprise made it more difficult for the government to retain its few really able offi cials. The majority of the persons appointed on the nomination of ministers and members of Parliament were notoriously incompetent. Each party respected the appointments of its predecessor and no one lost his post on a change of government —a fact which; while it mitigated the evils of the spoils system, added to the permanent inefficiency of the service. Occasionally a strong man (like Sir James Stephen, 1789-1859, or Herman Merivale, 1806 1874), was appointed from outside in middle age for special work, but as a rule men were appointed young and were employed for their first 10 or 15 years in copying letters and other routine occupations. The effect on the person
nel of the offices is described by Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote (Report on the Civil Service, 1854) : "Admission Into the civil service is indeed eagerly sought after, but it is for the unambitious and the indolent or incapable that it is chiefly desired. Those whose abilities do not warrant an expectation that they will succeed in the open professions, where they must encounter the competition of their contemporaries, and those whom indolence of temperament or physical infirmities unfit for active exertion, are placed in the civil service." The effect on the constituencies was even worse. Sir Charles Trevelyan, writing many years later, says: "Every borough and county except a few of the largest had its local man ager on either side — a banker, brewer or solicitor — who purchased the vote and support of the leading men by a judic'ous application of the loaves and fishes. The corruption so en gendered was more constant and general than the bribery carried on by means of money, and it was also more influential, in the degree in which a provision for life for a son or some other person in whom a voter was interested was more 'valuable than the customary five pound note." (Eaton, 'Civil Service in Great Britain,' p. 431).
In 1853 the government appointed Sir Charles Trevelyan, with the late Sir Stafford Northcote (afterward Lord Iddesleigh) as his colleague, to inquire into the whole question. Trevelyan had been (1826-38) in the service of the East India Company and was the brother in-law of Macaulay, who had been (1832-34) secretary to the India Board of Control and (1834-38) legal member of the Governor-Gen eral's Council. In 1833 Macaulay had suggested open competition for the uwriterships" of the East India Company as the only effective method of controlling the patronage of the directors.