Report.
limits should, as a general rule, be 19 and 25; in the case of candidates for inferior offices, 17 and 21.
Best mode of maintaining the efficiency of an office. Having thus completed our suggestions as to the best mode of obtaining a proper supply of public servants in the first instance, we have next to offer some remarks on what appears to us to be the best mode of regulating their employment, and their promotion, so as to maintain the efficiency of the office at the highest point.
Separation of intellectual from mechanical labour. As we have already spoken of the importance of establishing a proper distinction between intellectual and mechanical labour, we need offer no further observations on this most vital point. The proper maintenance of such distinction depends more upon the discretion and management of the chiefs of offices and those immediately below them, than upon any general regulations that could be made by a central authority. We consider that a great step has been taken by the appointment in several offices of a class of supplementary clerks, receiving uniform salaries in each department, and capable therefore of being transferred, without inconvenience, from one to another, according as the demand for their services may be greater or less at any particular time; and we expect that the moveable character of this class of officers, and the superior standard of examination which we have proposed for the higher class, will together have the effect of marking the distinction between them in a proper manner.
Question of a copying office. We are aware that a measure has sometimes been recommended, which, if adopted, would have the effect of establishing to a certain extent the separation which we have spoken of;—we mean the creation of a general copying office, common to the whole or most of the departments in the neighbourhood of Whitehall, at which all of them might pet their copying work done at a certain rate of payment by the piece.
Measure not recommended.
We are, however, not prepared to recommend the adoption of such a measure. Copying is not the only work of a mechanical, or nearly mechanical, character which is performed in the public offices. A great deal of work of various kinds, such as registering, posting accounts, keeping diaries, and so forth, may very well be done by supplementary clerks of an inferior class under the direction of a small number of superiors. Such work, however, could not be sent out of the office; and even with regard to copying, it would be found that several