THE HENLEY TEN-PER-CENT DELUSION.
A PROPOSAL, to cut down all official salaries, except those of lawyers and warriors, by the amount of ten per cent, is a proposition which will not retain its plausibility beyond a second glance. Even the Members who desired to figure in the division-list as advocates of reduced expenditure could not swallow the palpable mon- strosities of the proposal. It went upon the presumption that salaries were raised during the war to compensate official persons for the rise in the prices of provisions, and that since provisions have fallen in price the salaries may be reduced. But the pre- sumption is true only in part. Many offices have been re modelled since the war ; some have been created ; and in several not otherwise changed, the duties have been revised. The pretext on which the ten per cent was to have been enforced therefore fell to the ground. Independently of that fact, salaries in different offices are very unequal, and so are the duties : in some the work is hard and the Pay low; so that a uniform reduction would have the effect of Immensely increasing an existing injustice. Mr. Henley selected a most unlucky example for reduction in the letter-carriers of the Post-office, inasmuch as they are so ill paid that to take away a tithe of their income would bring distress upon them and oppro- brium on the soi-disant "reformer."
The proposition is not the stronger because some of the argu- ments brought against it are weak. Because it is falsely ar- gued that since men have arranged their expenditure according to a higher scale, salaries must not be reduced, it does not follow that it is on other grounds just to reduce them. Because it is falsely argued that augmented luxury renders a higher expendi- ture necessary, it does not follow that you should reduce those incomes which embrace no luxury. No doubt, many articles of convenience and comfort deemed necessary by the wealthy, or by those who; emulate the habits of the wealthy, are superflui- ties, which in no respect minister to the civilization or refine- ment of society ; and incomes based upon the necessity of main- taining dignity after the manner of " the silver-fork school" may be curtailed without mischief. Roughly it may be said, that all above four or five hundred a year for the father of a family is unnecessary, unless some distinct official outlay has to be made good.
But the bulk of all estimates is expended in salaries or wages of a much more modest order ; and upon the whole it may be said, that there is no need for reduction either in the number of men or in the pay. There is no force in the comparison of a state salary and salaries paid by private persons. It would not be be- coming in the state to emulate examples of meanness ; on the con- trary, it ought to set a liberal example of the rule that "the la- bourer is worthy of his hire." In many cases also the state can- not pay for work done : what it requires is, not only the execu- tion of the specific duty, but also the attendance of the workman at all times to perform the duty., whether the necessity should come or not. And the demands of the state are peremptory, brooking no excuse. It is bound therefore to pay each one of its enrolled servants at least enough for a livelihood. Mr. Hume complains, that men are well paid in the public ser- vice who could scarcely get bread and cheese elsewhere : what does he mean ? Would he turn them off and consign them to the starvation which, as he hints, would be their market value ? It is true that there are men so ill qualified by nature and training, that they could not command a livelihood by any talents accord- ing to our systems of money payment ; but no system of economy would venture to exclude such from all employment. Of ne- cessity the public service includes many routine employments, which demand leas than the average amount of cleverness, and may be fulfilled by cheerful fidelity. You need not look, then, to the market value of such work, so that the work be done ; because the state and the private employer do not necessarily trade in the same market.
But although a uniform curtailment of salaries would be neither just nor always economical,—nor, we believe, would any very sweeping contraction of money payments for service,—yet a better economy may very readily be enforced in most offices, by a revision of the work done. As the state ought to accept of no excuse for the omission of a duty, except the absolute necessities of our mortal nature, so we hold that all work, especially in the humbler grades, ought to be easy in amount, in order that a peremptory exaction might be consistent with a generous humanity. But in many offices the hours are preposterously short, making each day a sort of half-holyday. Eight hours' employment is a moderate day's work, and certainly below the average in this working country. Again, the methods pursued in the work of many offices con- duce to waste of time and labour, and a revision of the system would produce to the state more work for its money. The de- cline of personal influence throughout our general polity has been attended by a marked decline of certain personal virtues, and es- pecially that of a patriotic zeal in the public service. Generally it may be said that there is no zeal for the public service; and that where it is displayed, it is not of a high order—no better than an instinctive propensity to cheeseparing or a petty love of power. Few if any public servants in our day possess either the desire or the faculty to communicate a love of doing the work well to their subordinates in all stages below them. Such a spirit must perhaps be sought almost exclusively in the professional branches of the public service ; and it has probably received its highest illustration in the scientific expeditions of which this country has fitted out so many. Such a spirit is not to be awakened simply by a system of promotions, though that might help; but most chiefly by the living example of each grade to the one below it. The worldly wisdom of the day—and the mere worldly wisdom of any day is always a very dull and short- sighted wisdom—is against any sort of zeal, and most of all against any personal regard for the state. Self-interest is the naked motive recognized by a too exclusively free-trade phi- losophy. We are suffering for that intellectual blunder; which is probably one of the cyclical reactions against the bigotry of dog/mane religion. he reformer who could restore life to the spirit of the public service, would do much more than he who should enforce upon all civil officers an income-tax of two shillings in the pound. It would be an incident of such a renovated life, that the superior servants should abstain from that abuse of patronage which loads every branch of the public service with men unsuited to it--men who could get their bread and cheese elsewhere, and often in ,a vocation better fitted to them than the indolent certainty of our listless routine. Happily, the best reforms for a great state may always be animated by a higher and more generous spirit than Mr. Henley's tithe-tax on civil servants.
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