of another branch, be placed in the vacancy;--just hear
what Smith says then!

Words would fail to express his sentiments in the matter.

Jones, he considers, is a nincompoop, who has fed all his life on "flap-
doodle," which, as you may be aware, Lieutenant O'Brien told Peter
Simple was the usual diet of fools. Jones is a man _totally_ devoid of
all moral principle. How "the authorities" could ever have selected
such a person to fill so responsible a post is more than he, Smith, or
any one else, can understand! And, besides, how unfair it was, to take
a clerk from another and different office--and one essentially of a
lower character, Smith believes--and put him "over our heads in this
way," as he says, when rehearsing his wrongs and those of his official
brethren before a choice audience of the same--from which the chief is
the only absentee:--it was, simply disgraceful!

Smith thinks he "will certainly resign after this," and--he doesn't!

He goes on plodding round in his Government mill, grumbling and working
still to the end of his active life, when superannuation or a starvation
allowance comes, to ease his cares in one way and increase them in
another! And, to do him scant justice, he really _does_ work manfully,
at a lesser rate of pay, and with fewer incentives to exertion through
hopes of advancement, than any other representative person under the
sun--I do not care to what class or clique he may belong!

He is the miserable hireling of an ungrateful country, from his cradle
to his grave, in fact.

It is all very well for people unacquainted with the machinery of these
offices to talk about the idleness of Government clerks generally; and
joke at the threadbare subject of "her Majesty's hard bargains."

No doubt, some places are sinecures, and that a larger number of clerks
are employed in many offices than there is work for them to do; but, we
must not go altogether to the foot of the ladder to remedy this state of
things!

Why do not such ardent reformers as Mr Childers, and men of his stamp,
cut down their own salaries first, before they set about pruning those
of poor ill-paid subordinates?

I can tell them, for their private satisfaction, that, if they did so,
the onlooking public would have a much stronger belief in the honesty of
their reformatory zeal than it at present possesses!

It is not the "little men" that swell the civil list, as the vicar told
me before I saw it for myself, but