132 CORRESPONDENCE RELATING TO THE ADMIRALTY. [IN order that the correspondence which follows may be fully understood, it will be convenient to premise a few observations as to its subject. Before the issue of the Order in Council under which the Civil Service Commissioners act, many of the public departments had rules of their own as to the age and qualifications to be required in candidates. Not only were these different in different offices, but they differed in different branches of the same office. Thus, for example, a youth was eligible for a clerkship in the Inland Revenue and Customs as soon as he attained sixteen; but he could not be admitted to a junior situation in the Excise branch of the former department until he attained nineteen, and it was not until two years later that he became eligible as a tidewaiter or landing-waiter. Again, the educational qualifications were very different. Candidates nominated to clerkships in offices of account under the Inland Revenue were examined in "reading, writing, vulgar "fractions, decimals, book-keeping by double entry, writing from dictation, correspondence, geography, and the history of the British Empire," while, on the other hand, persons nominated as Expectants of Excise were only required to write from dictation, to work sums in arithmetic, including vulgar and decimal fractions, and to understand book-keeping by double entry. It should be mentioned also that it has been the practice of the various departments to introduce in times of pressure extra or temporary clerks, whose services have been dispensed with when no longer required. The persons so employed have not been recognized as in any way belonging to the "Establishments" of the different offices, according to the techinal use of the term, or as having any claim to succeed to vacancies on those Establishments. In this state of things the Order in Council of 21st May 1855 was issued. It will be seen from what precedes, and, indeed, to any one acquainted with the Civil Service it will be obvious without proof, that an attempt to establish uniformity of qualification, whether in respect of age, of physical ability, or of educational attainments, would have been in the last degree inexpedient. It would have swept away the precautions by which (as we have seen) experience had led the authorities of the various departments to guard against the nomination of unfit candidates, and would thus have thwarted most effectually the efforts made towards improvement. 66 No one who reads the Order in Council with due attention can suppose that it had any such object. Its preamble asserts the propriety of" testing by fixed rules the qualificatious of the young men who may from time to time be proposed to be appointed to the junior situations in any of Her Majesty's Civil establishments," and the distinctness of the various departments, thus adverted to at the outset, is throughout most carefully recognized. It is next provided that "all such young men as are proposed to be appointed to any junior "situation in any department of the Civil Service shall, before they are admitted to probation, be "examined by or under the direction of the Commissioners, and shall receive from them a "certificate of qualification for such situation." The certificate, therefore, is to be a certificate of fitness, not for any (or every) situation in the Civil Service, but for the situation to which the candidate is at the time "proposed to be "appointed." Before granting their certificate, the Commissioners are to ascertain, first, that the candidate is within the limits of age prescribed in the department to which he desires to be admitted; secondly, that he is free from any physical defect or disease which would be likely to interfere with the proper discharge of his duties; thirdly, that his character is such as to qualify him for public employment; and, fourthly, that he possesses the requisite knowledge and ability for the proper discharge of his official duties. It will be noticed, that with reference to character, as to which there could hardly be any great variety of "fixed rules," the general term, "public employment" is used, while the other qualifications are to vary with the rules of the departments to which the candidates desire to be admitted, and the nature of the "official duties" attached to different situations. The next paragraph states that "the rules applicable to each department under each of the above heads should be settled, with the assistance of the Commissioners, according to the "discretion of the chief authorities of the department;" and a subsequent clause provides that "after the candidate has passed his examination and received his certificate, he shall enter on "a period of probation, during which his conduct and capacity for the transaction of business "shall be subjected to such tests as may be determined by the chief of the department for which "he is intended." It is hardly necessary to observe that this passage enjoins probation, not for the public service in general, with all its diversified requirements physical and intellectual, but for the specific situation to which, after that probation has been satisfactorily passed, the candidate is ultimately to be appointed. The tests imposed in a financial department would of course be very different from those which would be considered advisable in the office of a Secretary of State; and it is not probable that either in the one or in the other it would be ascer tained during a six months' probation whether the probationer possessed that knowledge of "Common Law. Equity, and Conveyancing "which is required from candidates for clerkships in the Solicitors' offices of the Treasury and Inland Revenue, and Post Office. The period of probation having been satisfactorily passed, the candidate, whose appointment was in the first instance only conditional, and who is therefore spoken of as "intended," so long as his probation lasts, for the situation to which he was nominated, is to be "finally appointed "to the public service." It need hardly be observed that the "final appointment "here spoken of is a final appointment to the situation for which he has been shown, by examination in the first place, and by probation afterwards, to be duly qualified. Construed in this manner, the Order is consistent throughout; and it is clear (as stated in the correspondence which follows) that the Commissioners are not relieved from the duty of ascer taining that a candidate is at the time when he is proposed to be appointed to a given situation eligible for that situation, by the fact that at some former time he was considered eligible for some other situation. |