PROBATION FOR CIVIL SERVANTS.
THE natural justification of an examination as a test to be applied to a candidate for the Civil Service is that you cannot otherwise as- certain his fitness for the work. To give every candidate an actual trial in the office would seem a pod plan were it not open to two serious objections—first, that in the trial of incompetent persons the public time and money would be wasted ; and secondly, that such trials are always a sham. At present there is supposed to be a pro- bationary period for every clerk entering the service, three months in some, six months in other offices. But the young probationer at once takes rank as one of the regular clerks ; he works and chats and jokes with his colleagues, duly reads the morning papers, and does his other work from ten to four, in concert with them and with his superiors ; and when his period of probation is over, it is not in human nature to send in an unfavourable report. The new clerk must be very bad indeed if he find himself turned out, and we suspect that such rejection does not take place in the whole ser- vice more than once a year, if so frequently. The preliminary examination has the advantage of testing the qualifications of the clerk, and if he be rejected, neither he nor the public service loses any time. It has the disadvantage of not being (especially with its over literary character as it is now arranged) a complete and genuine test of official ability. It tests some fundamental qualifi- cations of the clerk, but it cannot tell us anything as to his cha- racter or disposition. We all know men who can be good offi- cials for a month, a week, or even a day ; we know men who when fired by a sudden access of zeal can do their work wonder- fully well for a week, but then sink back into error, idleness, and wild neglect, and are in fact incapable of the "patient continuance in well-doing" so essential in all regular official work. Such men abound in every calling. They are known at the bar, at the press, in every profession—they are men of great qualifications, men who could go through a two days' severe compe- titive examination with eclat, but who are incapable of filling any situation satisfactorily for six months. You cannot discover the demerits of such men by literary examinations. It is said, however, that the Civil Service is not a special " mystery " or craft, and that, therefore, you cannot institute for it an examination such as Lord Stanley has lately instituted for India engineerships, where all the marks (excepting a very few for Anglo-Indian history) are given for proficiency in the very quali- fications required. This error is, we believe, at the bottom of nearly all the nonsense written about the service. Civil Service is a special mystery and craft. It is that science of administration which gave to Carnet the proud title of " organiser of victory." It requires in its higher branches minds of very great rarity. The administrator in his obscure work has not many incitements to exertion. He is doing no vulgar task patent to the public eye ; he is manipulating details that the public will never hear of, and. maturing plans that the public will perhaps never understand. His talent is a kind of mastery in mechanics, but, unlike the me- chanist, his materials are not dead, docile, steady metals, but the many minds of many men of very various powers. He has to make them all work so as to produce week by week results almost mechanical in their equality ; and their fears, hopes, desires, must be used as means of ruling them, not as obstacles under which to succumb, nor as excuses for inferior work. The art of ruling men in civil work is very difficult. There are no traditions of glory to be appealed to ; you must present prosaic inducements ; and you must be careful in rewards and promotions, lest in elevating one man, and thereby securing his zeal, you disgust and dis- hearten a dozen, whose consequent want of energy will more than counterbalance the extra exertion of the one rewarded. Even when we regard an individual civil servant not governing any clerks, but doing his own work, we find that his continuous good service presupposes a certain combination of qualities not so common as many suppose. The details of his work are generally minute, the general results are often not obvious, and he requires considerable patience to do his petty work day after day, to do it well not through hope of praise or reward, for he cannot natu- rally expect them for routine work, but through a quiet conscien- tiousness which would not allow him to do the work badly. To this patience and conscientiousness must be added of course the ability to discern the proper application of Judgment to his laborious routine of work. We do not speak here of mere copy- ing, though even an intelligent and accurate copyist. has his spe- cial value ; but let us take one of the examiners in the Audit Office. Persons ignorant of the service will imagine, perhaps, that knowledge of arithmetic and patience to compare vouchers with accounts are all that is necessary ; but a good examiner must possess a very peculiar intelligence. He has to keep in mind the extent of many acts of Parliament authorising expendi- ture; and he has to apply day after day general rules and " au- thorities " to multitudinous details. He may give his superiors and the accountants immense trouble by making queries which seem serious but turn out to be trivial objections ; he may through want of shrewdness pass enormous errors carefully dis- guised ; but a good examinersaves much of the public time by a discretion which knows when to examine with extra vigilance, and when to take small items in a general inspection—when to query every suspicious figure and when to pretermit a useless query by anticipating the satisfactory answer. This work is en- trusted, in the Audit Office, not to the heads of the office, but to the clerks, and humble as such work may seem, it requires for its proper doing capabilities that many men well versed in evezy branch of literary knowledge or ability could not command. We have spoken of the qualities of the head of an office ; we have instanced the kind of duties often discharged by junior clerks ; but between the two there are a hundred varieties of peculiar tasks, duties, and responsibilities discharged by the civil servants. Some, as in the Foreign Office and War Office, are entrusted with State secrets that they might readily sell at a high price. Others, as in the Inland Revenue and Customs have infor- mation that might be worth thousands to merchants and traders. In the positions of accountants, cashiers, bookkeep- ers, moral and pecuniary responsibilities of a most serious kind, demanding constant care and head work, are placed on -civil servants, and require not alone personal honour and great ability, but an amount of tact and discretion which do not al- ways accompany ability and honour. We cannot honestly say that the work is done by the present Civil Service entirely as it might be done ; we are well aware of their general shortcomings in point of industry and devotion ; and we will admit that a good civil servant, taking the same pleasure in his official work that is taken by a professional man, is rare enough. But there are such civil servants, and we maintain that in doing their work, work of the kind. we have described, they exercise peculiar qualifications as high as those in many professions, and which no merely literary examination can test.
It seems to us as a natural consequence of these facts, that a re- form of the present system of admission is required. The present examination should be retained (with some modifications tending to make it more equitable as applied to persons of different ages) ; but. the successful competitor should in all eases be appointed merely to a temporary clerkship, with the rule strictly laid down, that he could not obtain a clerkship on the establishment until after three years' service. All appointments to clerkships in the establish- ment should then be given exclusively amongst the temporary clerks. The good. results of this reform are evident. By the preliminary examination you insure that the new clerk has the requisite literary qualifications—the raw material of a good. clerk. During three years' temporary clerkship, his immediate superiors can test his punctuality, accuracy, steadiness, and. quick- ness in acquiring a mastery of special work : and by a strict sys- tem of recording every minute fault or shortcoming during those three years, the heads of the office could easily test the compara- tive merits of their subordinates. This period of probation would be saved from being the sham which probations generally- are, were the heads of the office given a voice in the regulation of the appointments to the permanent staff. It may be suggested by some persons that the permanent appointments should be given by competition amongst the temporary clerks. This plan would certainly obviate all complaints of partiality, and would spare some trouble, but would be defective in many respects. If two temporary clerks have been working side by aide in the same office for many years ; if his superiors have remarked in one clerk willingness to work, quickness, accuracy, and zeal; if he has been to them a real, zerdial assistant and helper, and if on the con- trary the other has been merely not disobedient, doing what he was told, and doing that with mere dull literal obedience, why should. you place them on an equality in a competitive li- terary examination ? In their two day's trial before the Civil Service Commissioners, the bad clerk may show that he knows more than the other, and that his literary qualifications are as high; but has not the simultaneous three years' service of the two been the very best competitive examination—an examina- tion testing character, literary ability, and clerkship, in the most see.rchin. g manner ? Yet the Commisioners, not taking these things into account, may declare the bad clerk the victor, and the head of his office may, to their regret, lose the services of a superior official. The promotion of temporary clerks to permanent posts should therefore be so arranged as that each clerk should find it his interest to work his best in the office. It must be
remembered, that under the new system each temporary clerk would have passed a literary examination ; and, therefore, any
further examination of this kind would be unnecessary and un- fair. An appointment to a permanent post should therefore be given at the nomination of the head of the office to one of the temporary clerks who had served for three years, and who was pronounced to be specially deserving of it by his conduct in the office, and who should prior to obtaining it be required at three or six months' notice to pass an examination in some of the higher qualifications likely to be required in the office. This arrange- ment meets the case occurring more than once where the heads of a department remark sterling merit in a subordinate but have no means of rewarding it. It will be said. that by this plan you open a door to favouritism. Without stopping to point out that favouritism, so called, is sometimes the natural approval by a just chief of continued zeal, we would meet this ground of imputation by a rule that every second vacancy for a permanent situation in the office should be awarded after a competition amongst all the temporary clerks, the subjects and scope of the competition being regulated in exact harmony with the work done in the office. It should also be arranged that the heads of the office should have it in their power to shut out from the competition any clerk whose conduct during the previous year merited that deprivation. This sentence should not deprive the censured clerk of his right to compete on succeeding occasions, but it would be a good means of punishment in the hands of the chiefs. There would under this plan be in every office a staff of temporary clerks not less than one third of the whole offioe, all animated by the con- sciousness that industry or zeal would lead to promotion, and all knowing that their superiors had in their hands the means of punishment and reward. Then should there be in the office men grumbling about "favouritism," there would be for every second vacancy the fair open competition, not in history, geography, or in school tests, but in the kind of work done in the particular office or section of the office in which the vacancy occurred. The whole result would be that a successful civil servant should, first, have passed a literary examination on entrance ; secoxidly, have served three years to the satisfaction of his superiors ; and, thirdly, have obtained a situation on the establishment either as a direct reward for his conduct, or by a fair victory in a competitive exa- mination.
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