wall by the river side: the water just below.

Pass

:

ing from the churchyard, we go by the large mill; on its side are marked the lines to which, at various times of flood, the river has risen. It must have made all the country round a sea. Cross the river by a footbridge, elevated high and along the further side to the point where you have the church opposite you. Now Stratford-on-Avon is a possession for ever: and as the day declines we go. Going, one thought of another genius, a far less genius than Shakespeare, but a genius as real the scenes of whose birth and death have been familiar since childhood.

:

All ask the cottage of his birth,

Gaze on the scenes he loved and sung,
And gather feelings, not of earth,

His fields and streams among.

They linger by the Doon's low trees,

And pastoral Nith, and wooded Ayr ;
And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries,
The poet's tomb is there!

But they did not mind in the least about moving his bones. The rest of the dead was disturbed, and certain fussy persons 'tried their hats' upon the skull of Burns. They found (as might well have been anticipated) that all their hats were a great deal too small.

Birmingham once more returning to it for the last time. Again the dreary dinner, eaten in a populous solitude and the cup of specially bad tea.

Again climb the desolate stone stairs, uncarpeted, reminding one of a prison. The only home-like place in a great hotel is one's own little chamber. Here are the friendly faces of a few books, companions of one's solitude. Here the receptacle (warranted solid leather) which gains almost a human interest through long common travel, and faithfully keeping so much given to its care. It must be packed to-night; things go into their accustomed places: the bare little room looks barer when they are stowed away. Pasted on the door, the ominous warning obtrudes itself-Please bolt the door before going to bed. How many little details are crowded into one's memory; and how capriciously they go and stay! Next morning, at 8.50, away by the Midland line. Tamworth, Burton, where were many trucks laden with innumerable casks of beer; Derby, Chesterfield, with its strange spire, much off the perpendicular; Sheffield, under a thick pall of smoke; Normanton, York, Newcastle, Berwick, Edinburgh at 8.30 P.M., after a long day. A restful day to one's mind, of pleasant reading, with little intermissions, and glimpses of not unfamiliar scenes gliding by.

105

CHAPTER VI.

OF COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION AND SELECTION

THEREBY.

SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY, with very good reason, for a large part of his life looked forward to being Lord Chancellor. But though men who never evened themselves (pardon the expressive Scotticism) to that great place have reached it and filled it decently, the great man who would have filled it nobly never reached it. Yet anticipating what was never to be (as each of us has done many times), he wrote out some sketch of what he would do when he became Chancellor: set forth the principles on which he intended to act. The following lines stand in this sketch: very startling to many when they were written for the boldness and novelty of the idea:

Invariably to appoint to offices the men who are most fit to fill them: to do this in every profession, and in every department of the State.'

It is strange, indeed, that this should need to be said. Might it not have been taken for granted? For it amounts to this: 'I will always use a knife

when I want to cut a saw when I want to saw a spade when I want to dig.'

Sir Samuel, thus resolving, plainly regarded preferment as duty. The thing he had mainly in view was that the place be well filled, the work well done.

The first Napoleon, again, regarded preferment as privilege. It was something to be got, and enjoyed. No doubt, duty went with it. But the thing he had mainly in view was to stimulate the competitors, and to keep them hopeful, and assured that they would have fair play. Yet his rule for the appointment to offices would result in the same manner as the rule of Sir Samuel. It was La carrière ouverte aux talens.' Strange, too, that this should need to be said: which comes to The tools to him that can use them.

6

Of course, everybody knows how much it needed to be said: and how strange it would sound in many ears. In my youth, I had some acquaintance with aristocratic folk. It was very interesting to remark the cool way in which they just took it for granted, as plainly axiomatic, that any good things going should go to them. The privileged class was to get all preferment, all places of credit and profit, without the smallest consideration whether deserved or not. You were a Radical (a term of vague but crushing condemnation) if you ventured to suggest the republican and levelling theory that fitness was ever to be thought of. These refined and serene intelligences would have been horrified above measure by the

mention of that strange rule laid down for his own guidance by Romilly. And indeed he was a very advanced politician. Lower down, too, such a thing has been known as that an office has been conferred on a man, not because the man was fit for the duty, but because it would be very convenient for himself that he should get it. The case in point here is the well-known election at which the successful cry was, 'Vote for Bung for Beadle: a wife and eight small children.' Poor fellow (that is), he needs the pay: doing the work is a secondary matter. Or, as for the work, the idea may have been latently present which George II. put in words: Any man in England is fit for any place he can get.'

Now the idea which is at the foundation of the system of selection by Competitive Examination is an excellent one. I do not ask, nor care, whether the system took its rise from a desire on the part of the dispensers of preferment to be free of worry, solicitation, and the trouble of making a choice, or not. But the idea is Detur Digniori. Let the fittest man have it. If the son of a baronet and the son of a butcher each. want the same thing, let genealogy count for nothing, but merit decide. It is a great thing that it has come to this at last. And to a man brought up in certain rural tracts whether of Scotland or of England, it is a very strange and wonderful thing.

Thus both parties will be well served. The