PREFACE.
The substance of this Pamphlet consists of a Paper contributed to the Educational Conference held in London on the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th of June last. As circumstances prevented the paper from being then read and discussed, a desire has been expressed that it should be placed before the public in its present form.
The main object of the Paper was to shew how far the inferior appointments in the Civil Service of the Crown might—consistently, not merely with the efficiency but with the increased efficiency of the Civil Service itself,—be made available for the encouragement of school education and self-improvement in the great body of the people. Written for an Educational Conference, it, of course, discusses the proposed plan of competition principally from an educational point of view; but the course of argument adopted is such as sufficiently to protect the writer from the charge of seeking to promote education at the expense of the Civil Service. No one can hold more strenuously than he does that the main object of any change in the mode of making appointments to the public service must be—the welfare of that service; and that no change should be made, however beneficial in other respects, by which the Service would not be a gainer. But, if it be apparent that a certain alteration would not only attain this prime and essential object but would also produce, as one of its results, a wide extension of popular education, there can be nothing which should prevent a friend of education, or an Educational Conference, from advocating such an alteration for the sake of that result. Nor is there any good reason why the State itself, if satisfied that a certain change would be for the good of the Service, may not extend its view to the collateral advantages of the change, and all the more readily effect it on the very ground of those advantages. Especially are we entitled to expect that with a Government anxious to promote the education of the people such collateral benefits as would flow from the change now proposed would
