for an employ which required energy, activity, or ready-wittedness.
There is no such inefficiency as self-sufficiency; and this is the
very quality instilled by the whole system. Ask the veterans of the
Admiralty, the War Office, the Board of Trade, and the Customs, and
you will get but the same report, that for thorough incompetency and
inordinate conceit there is nothing like the prize candidate of a Civil
Service examination. Take my word for it, you could not find a worse
pointer than the poodle which would pick you out all the letters of the
alphabet.

What I should therefore suggest is, to introduce into the Civil Service
something analogous to this clinical examination; something that might
test the practical fitness of the candidate, and show, not whether
the man has been well prepared by a "grinder," but whether he be a
heaven-born tide-waiter, one of Nature's own gaugers or vice-consuls.

I know it is not easy to do this in all cases. There are employments,
too, wherein it is not called for. Mere clerkship, for instance, is an
occupation of such uniformity that a man is just like a sewing-machine,
and where, the work being adjusted to him, he performs it as a matter of
routine. There are, however, stations which are more or less provocative
of tact and ready-wittedness, and which require those qualities which
schoolmasters cannot give nor Civil Service examiners take away; such as
tact, promptitude, quickness in emergency, good-natured ease, patience,
and pluck above all. These, I say, are great gifts, and it would be well
if we knew how to find them. Let us take, by way of illustration, the
Messenger Service. These Foreign Office Mercuries, who travel the whole
globe at a pace only short of the telegraph, are wonderful fellows, and
must of necessity be very variously endowed. What capital sleepers,
and yet how easily awakened! What a deal of bumping must their heads be
equal to! What an indifference must they be endowed with to bad roads
and bad dinners, bad servants and bad smells! How patient they must be
here--how peremptory there! How they must train their stomach to
long fastings, and their skins to little soap! What can Civil Service
examination discover of all or any of these aptitudes? Is it written in
Ollendorf, think you, how many hours a man can sit in a caleche? Will
decimal fractions support his back or strengthen his lumbar vertebrae?
What system of inquiry will declare whether the weary trave