Note (return) — Chapter III

Most of his correspondents thought that the idea was hopelessly impracticable. It seemed like the intrusion into the world of politics of a scheme of cause and effect derived from another universe—as if one should propose to the Stock Exchange that the day's prices should be fixed by prayer and the casting of lots. Lingen, for instance, the permanent head of the Education Office, wrote considering that, as matter of fact, patronage is one element of power, and not by any means an unreal one; considering the long and inestimably valuable habituation of the people of this country to political contests in which the share of office ... reckons among the legitimate prizes of war; considering that socially and in the business of life, as well as in Downing Street, rank and wealth (as a fact, and whether we like it or not) hold the keys of many things, and that our modes of thinking and acting proceed, in a thousand ways, upon this supposition, considering all these things, I should hesitate long before I advised such a revolution of the Civil Service as that proposed by yourself and Sir Stafford Northcote.'[88] Sir James Stephen of the Colonial Office put it more bluntly, 'The world we live in is not, I think, half moralised enough for the acceptance of such a scheme of stern morality as this.'[89] When, a few years later, competition for commissions in the Indian army was discussed, Queen Victoria (or Prince Albert through her) objected that it reduced the sovereign to a mere signing machine.'[90]