Political Order and Political Decay (21 page)

 

8

PATRONAGE AND REFORM

How Britain and America both started the nineteenth century with patronage-based bureaucracies; genesis of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in the Indian Civil Service; the middle-class coalition; why Britain never developed clientelistic political parties

Britain and the United States started the nineteenth century with patronage-laden governments that were not too different from those of Greece and Italy. Unlike the latter two countries, however, both reformed their public sectors and laid the groundwork for a much more modern bureaucracy. In Britain, an aristocrat-dominated, patronage-laden civil service was reformed over a brief fifteen-year period and replaced by highly educated professional civil servants. In the United States, patronage was deeply entrenched and took much longer to eradicate: the two political parties, Republican and Democratic, had evolved around the distribution of jobs in the civil service and resisted tenaciously the effort to replace political appointees with merit-based civil servants. It took two generations of continuing political struggle stretching into the early twentieth century to fix this system.

As we have already seen, democracy can make political reform difficult. The United States, by opening up the franchise to all white males a good sixty to seventy years earlier than Britain, not only pioneered the development of mass political parties but also invented the practice of clientelism. Britain by contrast remained a restrictive oligarchy throughout much of the nineteenth century and could thus reform its civil service before mass political parties were ever tempted to use public office as a currency for buying votes.

England's position as an island gave it considerable protection, and it never faced the existential threats that landlocked Prussia did. Thus while its Admiralty gained substantially in professionalism during the numerous wars it fought during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the rest of the civil service remained heavily patronage based. While the establishment of parliamentary accountability created pressures to rein in some of the worst abuses of public office, the elites were quite happy to use government service as a means of advancing their own interests and the interests of their relatives and supporters.
1
Personal connections rather than merit were the means by which individuals were placed in positions of responsibility. Consider the following letter from Mrs. Cecilia Blackwood to Lord John Russell in 1849: “A drowning man catches at a straw but I look upon it as a very substantial straw, you being not only the greatest man in England but the most powerful man in the world … When I reflect that your mother and my father were first cousins, I hope to come within the warmth of your rays. We now propose sending my son to Cambridge … I shall live in the hope that he may at some time, if not immediately, be placed by you in some suitable situation.”
2
People in all societies trade upon their connections, but in early-nineteenth-century Britain, connections within a very small elite were all that existed for appointment to government office. As a result, there was no regular civil service as there was in Prussia, with its highly autonomous and elite bureaucracy. Rather, there was a collection of well-connected officeholders of questionable competence and often nonexistent training.

One of the early efforts to curb Crown patronage was inaugurated by the great statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke in 1780 with an attack on placemen (patronage appointees) and sinecures.
3
Another early target for reform was the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Britain did not rule India directly until the Rebellion of 1858; instead, it chartered a commercial corporation, the East India Company, which exercised quasi-governmental authority on the subcontinent. The very term “civil service” originated in India as a means of distinguishing the East India Company's civilian employees from its military ones.
4
The men who volunteered for the ICS were not the cream of British society; working conditions and long years away from home made it a haven for dropouts, adventurers, and men who had failed in occupations at home. In the words of Adam Smith, a thousand pounds of company stock gave a “share … not in the plunder, yet in the appointment of the plunderers of India.” A directorship of the company paid a very small salary but entailed enormous benefits in a director's ability to dispense jobs and moneymaking opportunities to friends, relatives, and clients.
5

The work of the ICS was, nonetheless, varied and demanding, and required a broad range of administrative skills. Recognizing the need to improve the quality of civil servants there, the company's directors established a college at Haileybury to train young recruits in oriental languages, mathematics, literature, law, and history. The government, recognizing the need for a better class of civil servants, pressed the directors to establish competitive selection in place of the nominations that were up to then used to fill vacancies. In the debate over the Government of India Act of 1833 that would renew the company's charter, Thomas Babington Macaulay (later Lord Macaulay) made an impassioned argument for open competition and educational qualifications as the basis for service in India. Macaulay would go on to serve on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, where he introduced reforms of the educational system, making English a major language of instruction, and of the Indian penal code.
6

The directors of the East India Company initially rejected these demands for open recruitment because it was not in their interest to do so: they were in effect a rent-seeking coalition that used their control over appointments to enrich themselves. Moreover, there was a strong class interest in keeping the recruitment pool very narrow; of the civilians sent to India between 1860 and 1874, almost three-quarters were sons of the aristocracy, gentry, army, navy, the ICS itself, or one of the learned professions. Reform of the ICS did not occur until the rise of an energetic young official in its ranks, Sir Charles Trevelyan.
7

Trevelyan came from a baronet's family, attended Haileybury, and worked at a number of jobs for the East India Company including deputy secretary in Calcutta. His experience with the unreformed company made him a bitter enemy of patronage and a believer in a meritocratic society open to all. He was disgusted with India as the “sink to which the scum and refuse of the English professions habitually gravitates.”
8
Trevelyan met Macaulay in India and later married Macaulay's sister, and the two collaborated closely on reform of the ICS. Trevelyan then moved on to the Treasury where in 1840 he became assistant secretary, in effect the head of the agency. While proving himself an able administrator, Trevelyan noted that the bureau was badly organized and suffered from many of the same dysfunctions as the ICS.
9

Together with Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been William Gladstone's private secretary at the Board of Trade, Trevelyan drafted the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854, a document of just over twenty pages that was actually not so much a break with the past as the culmination of a series of reports on public-sector reform, including the ICS, that had been produced in the previous decade.
10
It called for an end to patronage appointments and for civil service examinations as a gateway into government service. It also proposed splitting routine clerical duties from higher administrative functions, and setting high educational requirements for the latter. The kind of humanistic education that the report identified as necessary, while theoretically open to all social classes, in fact restricted the candidate pool to the aristocracy and upper middle class who had the money and connections to send their sons to Oxford and Cambridge. Nonetheless, these strict educational requirements shifted the British government much closer to the Prussian and French models, and meant that administrators would actually develop into a service with its own solidarity and autonomy.

While individuals like Trevelyan were motivated by their hatred of a government dominated by incompetent aristocrats, this kind of reform could not have been possible except under the exclusive conditions of British upper-class life. Trevelyan was, as noted earlier, related to Macaulay, who was in turn a confidant of Gladstone, chancellor of the exchequer at the time of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report, who would go on to be prime minister for the first of his four terms in office in 1868. Northcote was Gladstone's personal secretary, and all were friends of Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol College, Oxford, and a leader in the movement to reform the university system.
11
These elite personal connections were sufficient to create a coalition in Parliament to push through the writing of the Trevelyan-Northcote Report and, eventually, the reform itself. This manner of operating stood in sharp contrast to the United States, where there was no cohesive elite, and where reform ideas had to be argued out and fought on a state-by-state basis in a much larger and more diverse society.

A second group of elites in England, led by John Stuart Mill, Edwin Chadwick, and an organization of businessmen called the Administrative Reform Association, also promoted meritocratic civil service recruitment and an examination system. The intellectual genesis of this group lay in the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill's father, James Mill, who emphasized rationality and efficiency in administration. They were popularized through groups like the Political Economy Club and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. John Stuart Mill himself had worked for the East India Company (of which he seems to have had a more positive impression than Trevelyan) and contributed an important memo on reform while the Northcote-Trevelyan Report was being drafted.
12
Unlike the Trevelyan-Northcote group, however, they favored not a humanistic or liberal education but a technical one focusing on the sciences, economics, and engineering, the type of training one would get at the London School of Economics rather than Oxford and Cambridge. They argued that these practical skills would be better suited to government service than knowledge of Greek and Latin, and would along the way decrease the advantages of the upper classes that dominated the Oxbridge system.
13

These reformist ideas were circulated through a new popular media read by the middle class, and by the countless new clubs and societies that sprang up in the first half of the nineteenth century to promote industry, science, technology, and reform like the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. They were also supported by a broad revolution in values that had been taking shape during the preceding century, a shift from what economist Albert Hirschman has called the passions to the interests. The older aristocracy was descended from a warrior caste that prized glory, honor, and bravery; it disdained commercial activity and moneymaking as unworthy of gentlemen. Work was not valued for its own sake, which is why children of the aristocracy were content to coast through Oxford and Cambridge based on their connections, riding, hunting, and drinking rather than studying. The new middle classes, by contrast, had only their hard work and talents to offer, and through their entrepreneurial energy were creating vast amounts of new wealth.
14

The university system would not have been able to play the key role assigned to it had it not itself undergone considerable reform. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, British universities were characterized, in the words of Richard Chapman, by “lethargy, corruption, and sinecurism,” with Oxford professors virtually having ceased to lecture. He reports how Lord Eldon graduated in 1770: “By way of examination he was asked only two questions to test him in Hebrew and History: ‘What is the Hebrew for the place of a skull?' and ‘Who founded University College?' By replying ‘Golgotha' and ‘King Alfred' he tells us that he satisfied the examiners who asked him nothing else.”
15
In a process that intensified by the middle of the century, however, the universities were subject to successive waves of reform to improve their standards and increase their openness, including the Oxford Act of 1854, the Cambridge Act of 1856, and the Universities Tests Act of 1871 that eliminated religious tests as conditions for admission. In addition, the University of London was founded in 1836; it as well as other schools increased competition for Oxford and Cambridge and contributed to the debate on educational reform. Benjamin Jowett was a key figure in upgrading the examination system, which made him a natural coconspirator in the civil service reform efforts.

Behind all of this reform activity across a wide variety of institutions was one outstanding social fact: the Industrial Revolution was kicking into high gear in Britain and bringing with it a massive change in the country's social structure. The older agrarian society with its great landowners radiating power and authority was rapidly being displaced by an urban one led by industrialists and entrepreneurs. In the words of Richard Chapman,

Middle-class radicals—whose significance had grown as a result of the industrial revolution and puritan attitudes associated with ‘the onward march of the nonconformist conscience' … —felt that much that they believed to be wrong in government was primarily the result of patronage. This middle-class attack was based on the assumption that it was the landed aristocracy who exercised patronage, in their own interests; and it was, in fact, part of the aristocratic system of government (as with the Army and Navy) and it was both inefficient and indefensible.
16

These middle-class groups had a direct interest in getting access for their children to Oxford and Cambridge, and to find employment for them in the civil service.
17