state with a succession of experienced men competent to its highest employments.

Bearing this in mind, let us proceed to examine his establishment of clerks. The points to be treated of in respect to them are 1st. Their functions, 2d. Their selection and no

mination, 3d. Their remuneration,

Their promotion.

4th.

I. As to their functions, they are of two kinds, intellectual and mechanical; and it were reasonable, therefore, that they should be divided / into two classes, those who are fit for the one sort of employment, and those who are competent to the other only. I have heard it said indeed not unfrequently, that a young man should be employed in copying for some time at first, in order that he may learn his business; but if that business is to be intellectual I cannot think that this is the way really to teach it. If a man should apply himself diligently to mechanical labour, that will never lead him

into the path of intellectual exertion. If he revolt from mechanical labour (as may be expected of a highly educated man of good abilities) and yet find that that is the only task assigned to him, he will lapse into idleness. I conceive, therefore, that the man who is ever to be employed in the transaction of a statesman's business, should be chosen for his aptitude to that employment, and should be put to it at once, in a somewhat inferior grade at first, but so as to exempt him from any considerable amount of purely mechanical labour.

With respect to the manner in which this labour should be procured to be done, there may be a small separate class of salaried clerks for the despatch of such part of it as requires secrecy, whose views and prospects should be confined to their own sphere. But it will be found that the great bulk of the copying business of the office will be always executed most efficiently and cheaply by the piece or job,

paying persons in the rank of life of law-stationers and their hired writers at the rate of so much per folio, instead of employing salaried clerks ;-the hired writers to be, however, for better assurance of respectability and good conduct, permanently attached to the establishment. In the despatch of business, so far as copying is concerned, there is as much difference between this system and the other, as between a sick stomach and a hungry one. Upon the system of salaries, every person who is employed as a copyist is desirous to do as little as he can; upon the other there is a daily appetite and eagerness for work: upon the one system, when copying is wanted, it is not easy, whatever be the emergency, to get any persons set to work upon it but those to whose share of business it properly belongs; upon the other there is a strong body of competitors for employment susceptible of an immediate and unreluctant direction upon any work which may be urgently

required. The machine is self-acting in a great measure, and those whose minds ought to be free are spared the cares and vexations of perpetually guarding against delays of copyists, parrying their excuses, and exercising a sort of control which can hardly be exercised with success by persons of a certain class in life over each other. I speak from experience in both kinds when I say, that copying work will be done by the piece for a third of the money which it costs when committed to salaried clerks and with five times the speed; and I would observe, also, that the want of smoothness and celerity in this part of the operations of a statesman's official establishment constitutes a most important defect, a defect much more important than it might at first sight appear. Measures upon which the fate of individuals or the material interests of communities may be said in some sort to depend, will sometimes be obstructed, neglected, and delayed, owing to

this defect; and men in authority are often (to the credit of their personal dispositions) so averse to giving trouble to those about them or to the appearance of throwing away trouble which has been given, that measures and alterations of measures, in cases in which the sort of trouble in question ought to weigh no more than as the dust of the balance, sometimes turn upon the want of easy action in this part of the system of an office.

The copying part of the business being thus disposed of, it would remain to estimate what number of minds (in addition to those of the minister and his under secretaries) would be equal to the transaction of affairs in the office; and of so many men, or perhaps rather more than so many, its establishment of clerks should consist. I say rather more, because some allowance must be made upon any system of selection that could be devised, for failures and bad appointments.