ART. VI.—1. The Friend of India.

2. Petition presented to Parliament by the British India Association.

3. Petition of the Calcutta Missionary Conference.

4. Petition of the Bombay Association.

5. Petition of the Christian Inhabitants of Bengal.

WE shall make no apology for saying a few more words on the one important subject, which at present engages so much of the attention of local and periodical writers-the future Government of India. So long as the results of the Parliamentary investigation remain uncertain, so long will writers of all sorts, patriots true and false, special pleaders, honest and impartial advocates of reform, grievance-mongers by profession, and committees and associations, successively come forward with their strictures and suggestions, and their several plans for the regeneration of this country, in which good sense and extravagance, selfishness and public spirit, will be curiously commingled. We shall, however, abstain from coming forward with any plan, cut and dried, for the improvement of the general administration, and shall confine ourselves to a few remarks on several of the most notable opinions which have lately been propounded on this subject, whether by societies, patriots, or peers.

Among the points which naturally attract the most frequent criticism and animadversion, in connection with the Government of India, are the constitution, the attainments, and the general efficiency of the Civil Service. The reason of this is so obvious, as to require little comment. The situations filled by civilians are numerous, varied, and important. The emoluments attached to those situations are considerable. The advantages of the profession, generally, are great. The pensions bestowed after the usual period of service, secure to individuals an honourable competence in the evening of life. The degree of capacity, with which the various posts are filled and the duties of the Executive Government are discharged, affects every body in the remotest degree interested in the collection of the land revenue, the prevention of crime, the security and transfer of real property, the administration of civil and criminal justice, the maintenance of two great monopolies in particular localities of the empire, and the general character of the Executive Government throughout the length and breadth of the four presidencies. The above are powerful

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incentives to men to speak out. And thus all persons who wish for ample remuneration while they are at work, or for good pensions, when the work is done, or for prominence and elevation, or for situations for their sons and connections, or for a good and efficient administration everywhere, and for the enhanced civilisation, the moral reform, and the intellectual progress, of the native community, have been busied for the last year, in giving free utterance to their opinions as to the best mode of improving the character of the Civil Service, and of infusing into it-we use the stereotyped phrase adopted on these occasions-some new blood. The line of argument taken up by the supporters of this plan is somewhat as follows by those, we mean, who do not speak of the Civil Service in terms of rabid, rancorous and unmeasured abuse, and whose opinion alone has any claims to be heard. The Civil Service contains a fair proportion of talent, and has exhibited, in every generation, some signal instances of splendid statesmanship and undoubted capacity. As a body, it stands in bright and prominent contrast to any body of men occupied with the details of Civil Government in any dependency of the Crown. But it has its large proportion of drones, its brigade of incapables, its hard bargains from Leadenhall. Its salaries and remunerations are too high for these days of universal competition, proximity to England, and cheap workmanship. The judicial training is deficient. The rule of seniority stifles much energy, merit, and talent. The uncovenanted officers, who have often displayed great judgment and executive capacity, are precluded from rising to places of real emolument and trust. All this must be remedied. There is a vast quantity of serviceable talent and redundant activity at home, which is loudly calling for employment. This said talent overflows at the Universities, at public schools, at divers new colleges, proprietary or otherwise, on the outskirts of all learned professions, in the fens of Lincolnshire, in the plains of Wilts, in the dingy and murky atmosphere of the city. It lurks unnoticed in corners, unpatronized in the public places: it is carried by the mere force and pressure of circumstances into every profession in life; it waits, hopeful and hopeless, at every avenue to eminence; it emigrates in despair to Australia; it clears the backwoods of America; it guides the steam-ship and the train in this generation. It may be forced in the next, to guide the loom and the plough.

That there is a good deal of real, sterling, ability in England, which, somewhere about the age of twenty-three or twentyfour, finds itself rather at a loss, sometimes for a profession, and

sometimes for bread, is all very true. The question is-how is it to be got at? Shall a proclamation be issued, calling on all respectable fathers who have three or four well-educated sons, articled to Conveyancers, to send up the most promising of them for examination, on a certain day, at the India House, or the Board of Control? Shall a fixed number of appointments be reserved for competition, like fellowships, at both the universities, amongst such first class men or wranglers as may doubt the possibility of their attaining to the Great Seal, or ever wearing lawn sleeves? Are we to look to the noted public schools as the reservoirs which shall fertilize the barrenness of the governing body, and exuberantly repay the patronage of the Directors? Or, lastly, shall we seek to replenish our store only from India, and continuing to send out, under the present system, one-half of the Civil Service from England, retain the other half of the appointments for a distribution in India, which, exempt from partiality and from all interested motives, shall present to the admiring world, a spectacle of honest and judicious patronage, such as was never before witnessed? The advocates for a wider circulation of directorial bounty have been wonderfully united in their cry for a hunt after unrecognised merit, but they have, most of them, been ominously silent as to the details of the search. Nothing is easier than to get up a vague and indistinct clamour of this kind, or more true than to assert that the places of several members of the Civil Service might be more ably and efficiently filled by men, who, from the sheer want of a patron, are curates in England on £80 a year, or are driven to reporting debates in the House of Commons. But a driftless cry of this sort will do no good to any one. There is nothing for it, but to examine the various plans for increasing the efficiency of the Civil Service, and see whether any of them will stand a test. We believe that, putting aside for the present Lord Ellenborough's plan of recruiting from the army, to which we shall advert presently, the specific means of attaining the desired object, which have been hinted at by various writers, may be summed up as follows. 1, To bestow a certain number of appointments on the great public schools. 2, To break down the wall of partition between the covenanted and the uncovenanted service. 3, To give one-half of the Indian appointments to natives. 4, To leave a larger proportion of appointments with the Crown, to be given to the sons of deserving officers, of widows, and of poor curates, or to qualified candidates, wherever they are to be met with in the friction and bustle of civilized and over-crowded professions. Of the above proposals, which we

believe to be those into which the whole cry against the present monopoly may be resolved, it appears to us that the first is the only one which will bear the test of a rigid examination. As to recruiting from the Universities, the experiment would be, in our opinion, dangerous and rash. Graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, generally speaking, would be too old for the work, and most certainly, though we might occasionally get a man with all the best spirit of Alma Mater strong in him, we should not catch many Wranglers, medallists, Smith's prizemen, or Ireland scholars. Nor, will it be said, is this the stamp of men we require. We want thoughtful, energetic, judicious workers. But granting that some such might be found at either University willing to come to India, are we to take one-half of our Civil Service, varying in age from twenty-three to twenty-six, and the other half at the age of nineteen or twenty? And is there no risk in tearing men away from England just at the very time when they are beginning firmly to link themselves with, and keenly to relish, all that is attractive and elevating in, the struggle for existence at home: the restless energy, the diversified information, the temperate desire for independence, the firmness, and philanthropy, the modest self-reliance, the quiet consistency and moral earnestness, all in short, which more or less exalts, refines, and adorns the natural character, as it is seen in some one of the thousand walks of English life? Have not men of practised judgment deemed it absolutely essential, that those who are to fill all the executive posts of importance in the internal administration of the East, should be reft from England, and land in India, just when their character has acquired some consistency and firmness, without losing all its pliancy just when the habits have been sufficiently disciplined, while the adaptiveness to work out new ends, and to engage in totally new pursuits, has not been quite lost? We must not allow the civilian to land in India at too early an age, but we must not let him take too deep root in England. The tree should be transplanted before the fibres have clung lovingly to the soil. We must have men who are not too old to take kindly to Indian work, and who are not too young to have been unimpressed by all the best, most genial, and most purifying influences of English society and civilization. Thus, we have questioned the power power of the Universities to furnish a sufficient complement of Indian workmen, and we altogether deny the policy of the measure, even if the power were unquestioned.

We next come to the union of the covenanted and uncovenanted services. There is something more plausible at first sight in this measure. Many men not in the Civil Service, it is allowed,

perform their work well. They are efficient in the revenue, the police, and judicial departments; they decide civil suits affecting questions of vast importance, and sums of money of great amount; they check smuggling and illicit traffic in salt: they are entrusted with large disbursements of money, and a very considerable responsibility, in the superintendence of the poppy cultivation. They know all the details in their several branches, and they are quite capable of grasping the important bearings of the whole. Why should these men, who bear so much of the burden, be debarred from the profit? Why should their conversancy with the working of the department, and their thorough knowledge of minutiæ, debar them from the attainment of the chief places in their respective lines? Now, it is with no desire of depreciating the services of a valuable body of men, that we assert the Uncovenanted Service, as it is termed, to be composed of very diversified, and heterogenous, and uncertain elements. Of that body, it is well known, many individuals are natives, Mussulmans and Hindus of divers castes; many are East Indians, born and educated entirely in the country; and some few are Englishmen, who have obtained employment under Government by merit or favour, but, probably, after trying their hands at one or two other professions, only to meet there with failure or disappointment. It is not surely contended, that the barriers of exclusiveness should be at once thrown open, so as to admit a rush of aspirants from all quarters: East Indians and natives, men who have been rusticated from the Universities, briefless, but clever barristers, and adventurers trying their luck in one more cast for a livelihood. There must, we suppose, still be a constituted Service of some kind, the members of which shall all have passed through the prescribed course of examinations and trials, at home. To say that the service is an exclusive service-that no man can rise to eminence or independent control, who has not the words C. S. attached to his name is to say nothing more than what is the case with every post open to officers in the Queen's and Company's armies, with the Royal and Indian Navies, with the legal and medical professions, with the church, with every constituted body in short, which is hedged in by definite barriers, graduated on fixed principles, and controlled by certain laws. Of course, it will be said in reply to this, that in the Civil Service there are no blanks, but all are prizes. Without the learning, the discipline, and the arduous toil of the law, without the science and the skill of the physician and surgeon, without the scholarship, the uncompromising devotion, or the ennobling eloquence of the sacred minister, members of this exclusive service, it will be said, are, from the hour