s the matter in
small compass. "It will be necessary," says the writer, "that a certain
number of marks should be assigned to each subject, and that the place
of a candidate should be determined by the sum total of the marks which
he has gained. The marks ought, we conceive, to be distributed among the
subjects of examination in such a manner that no part of the kingdom,
and no class of schools, shall exclusively furnish servants to the East
India Company. It would be grossly unjust, for example, to the great
academical institutions of England, not to allow skill in Greek and
Latin versification to have a considerable share in determining the
issue of the competition. Skill in Greek and Latin versification has,
indeed, no direct tendency to form a judge, a financier, or a
diplomatist. But the youth who does best what all the ablest and most
ambitious youths about him are trying to do well will generally prove a
superior man; nor can we doubt that an accomplishment by which Fox and
Canning, Grenville and Wellesley, Mansfield and Tenterden first
distinguished themselves above their fellows, indicates powers of mind,
which, properly trained and directed, may do great service to the State.
On the other hand, we must remember that in the north of this island the
art of metrical composition in the ancient languages is very little
cultivated, and that men so eminent as Dugald Stewart, Horner, Jeffrey,
and Mackintosh, would probably have been quite unable to write a good
copy of Latin alcaics, or to translate ten lines of Shakspeare into
Greek iambics. We wish to see such a system of examination established
as shall not exclude from the service of the East India Company either
a Mackintosh or a Tenterden, either a Canning or a Horner."

[ORIGINAL SCHEME FOR THE INDIA SERVICE.]

Now, reverting to Macaulay's Table of Subjects as above exhibited, I may
observe that, till quite recently, no very serious alterations were ever
made upon it. The scale of marks, indeed, was altered more than once,
and sometimes Sanskrit and Arabic were struck off, and Jurisprudence and
Political Economy put in their stead; but, if we except the exclusion of
Political Philosophy in 1858, at the desire of the present Lord Derby,
from the Moral Science branch, the list remained, till Lord Salisbury's
late innovation, to all intents and purposes what it was at the
beginning. Here, for instance, is the prescription for 1875:--