Note (return) — Chapter III

In the meantime Sir Charles Trevelyan, a distinguished Indian Civilian who had married Macaulay's sister, had been asked to inquire, with the help of Sir Stafford Northcote, into the method of appointment in the Home Civil Service. His report appeared in the spring of 1854,[87] and is one of the ablest of those State Papers which have done so much to mould the English constitution during the last two generations. It showed the intolerable effects on the personnel of the existing Service of the system by which the Patronage Secretary of the Treasury distributed appointments in the national Civil Service among those members of parliament whose votes were to be influenced or rewarded, and it proposed that all posts requiring intellectual qualifications should be thrown open to those young men of good character who succeeded at a competitive examination in the subjects which then constituted the education of a gentleman.