316 [January 28, 1860.]  ALL THE YEAR ROUND. [Conducted by

and irregular stables, full of the sorry steeds

that drag the state coach along, demanding very
heavy mileage from John Bull. Henceforth the
stables are to be as sweet as any lady's boudoir.
The right men are coming to take their right
places. Those good old days when members
sold votes for sinecures; when the ignorant
younger son of my lord always had a lucrative
place ready for him; and when spelling was a
vulgar accomplishment, are to disappear utterly.
Our Government Schoolmasters are wielders
of vigorous lessons. Seeing the vice with which
they have to deal, and which they have to root
out, they come to the determination that igno-
rance shall no longer be a characteristic of a
civil servant. Ignorance shall be stamped out
of the Civil Service—except in a few cozy
little departments, from which it would be sheer
cruelty to drive retired colonels and cashless
cadets, " of the real tap." Our Schoolmasters
are, moreover, of the rotten Civil Service them-
selves, and it would be asking them to exhibit
more than human virtue to exact from them
strong measures against the coziness of go-
vernmental pigeon-holes, as select, and warm, and
pleasant as the Exchequer-office. Why should
Exchequer clerks be pestered with the study of
history, geography, or languages? These gen-
tlemen are on a higher level than the great mass
of clerks, and, therefore, may reasonably know
less. The Audit-office is under protection from
knowledge, as powerful as that enjoyed by the
Exchequer.

Our Government Schoolmasters have had
work enough with great branches of the
service. A few feathered nests for "honour-
ables," then, may be left, with only the shadow
of an examination. Foreign Service Messengers,
for instance, are usually half-pay colonels, or
cousins of a great house. Would it, we are
asked, be reasonable to demand that they should
know more, than the first four rules of arith-
metic, and, conversationally, one continental
language? It is true, these dignified letter
carriers get five hundred and twenty-five pounds
per annum from the date of their appointment
whereas your War-office clerk, who has made
the shade of the Admirable Crichton tremble,
begins his humble career with less than one hun-
dred pounds for a salary; but then, we repeat
feathered nests must be left, as our Government
Schoolmasters inform us. The clever thing is
to look severely at the lower forms while you
court the favour of the upper; and our Go-
vernment Schoolmasters have gone to work with
the lower forms without sparing the rod.

Having limited the qualifications for Inspec-
torships of Schools, to one of physical strength
(these inspectorships being looked upon in the
nature of plums belonging to the high powers
that direct the Queen's government), our School
masters have made up for a little convenient
leniency, by raising a high wall of hard questions:
between poor young Tweezle of Peckham-rye—
who has been undermining his constitution that
he might have the honour of knowing enough
geology to copy letters, and sufficient mathe-

natics to make a tolerable summary of a dull
document—and the modest stool he covets in
Pall-mall or in Downing-street.

Poor young ambitious Tweezle must repair to
Dean's-yard, Westminster, and there answer for
his command of writing, spelling, arithmetic,
ncluding vulgar and decimal fractions, Eng-
ish composition, précis, geography, history, and
Latin, " or one foreign language."

He is told to sit at a table; and within two
hours to write " a short notice of the life and
writings of the author of any well-known and
standard work." Or, if his genius be not of a
biographical turn, he may suppose that a friend
in Australia has asked him to describe, either
the Crystal Palace or the Manchester Exhibition,
and may proceed, on this supposition, to compose
his essay. Or again, if he cannot tackle the
Crystal Palace, he is at liberty to write an ac-
count of the present state of commerce in Great
Britain.

Composition triumphantly passed, by the ela-
boration of an essay after the manner of Macau-
lay, or a descriptive masterpiece after Ruskin,
ambitious Tweezle passes to précis of corre-
spondence. Let him knock off a lucid abstract
of Sir Richard Mayne's evidence before the
Select Committee on Transportation. Tweezle
still walks from triumph to triumph; and yet
the abstract and the essay have not won his clerk-
ship for him. Geography next stares him in the
face. In two hours and a half, he must spin
from point to point, from city to city, from
river to river, over the habitable globe. He
must describe the position and here and
there "any circumstances of interest which
attach to them " of the Hartz mountains,
the Khyber Pass, Candahar, and the Oregon
territory. He must state the names of the places
which export the greatest quantities of palm oil,
indigo, mahogany, and other articles, to England;
he must draw a contrast between the physical geo-
graphy of Africa and Europe—or write a minute
description of France or Egypt—or again, dis-
course wisely on the contrasting characteristics of
the European and Asiatic races. Two hours and
a half are handsomely allowed to Tweezle for
these extensive exhibitions of his learning.

His powers as an historian are next called
into play. Let him sketch briefly, the history
of the Peloponnesian war; glancing at the
chief actors in it, and its results. Then, he
shall review the rise and fall of Venice or Spain;
the lives of three popes; the causes of the
Great Rebellion in England; the characters of,
say, Vespasian, Mary Queen of Scots, and Alci-
biades; finally, the best and worst sovereigns
of the House of Plantagenet.

Then for the necessary foreign language. If
young Tweezle select "Latin, he may throw
off a translation from Sallust, Caesar, or Virgil.
An Inspector of Schools, with little of his
time employed, requires only a good digestion
and a muscular energy to entitle him to a
salary of two hundred pounds a year; but
poor Tweezle, whose daring eye has fallen upon
a clerkship in the War-office in Pall-mall at