damaged a cent. Now, youngster, this is my
Station, and if you don't believe in ghosts by
this time, it's my opinion you never will."

HOW NOT TO DO IT.

ELEVEN years ago, some highly humorous
papers on the Reorganisation of the Civil
Service were published by authority. There
had been some awkward charges of idleness,
incompetence, and waste of the public money;
impertinent people were holding indignation
meetings, and passing comments in the
newspapers; facetious stories concerning
ruler-balancing and Peter Dick-whistling in public
offices were told in the House of Commons;
and the shining lights of our civil service were
called upon to report how such scandals could
be avoided, and how the tone of their
profession could be improved. The shining lights
rose to the occasion, and their aggregated
labours were published in a blue book, which
received more attention than is commonly
bestowed upon those works of imagination. There
never was such a dreadful state of things as
stood revealed. The writers, who were nearly
all holders of comfortable government posts,
drew such a picture of the system under which
they had officially lived, moved, and had their
being, that one felt personally grateful to them
for not having succumbed to the evil influences
of their youth. The almost unanimous cry
was for greater talent and more energy in
the subordinate ranks. The " ablest and most
ambitious youth in the country" were, it
was almost pathetically insisted, drafted into
the open professions rather than into our
government offices; and a change was
advocated which should offer to energy and
enterprise their proper reward. One of the
ablest papers in this direction was written by a
gentleman who assisted in the great poor-law
inquiry of 1832, and who proved by implication
the Poor-law Department to be the one to which
the rest should look for emulation and advice.
The charges brought against the civil service
generally, were, he admitted, true; but, amid
the wilderness of indolence and misdoing, this
model office proudly reared its head for the rest
to look at and become hale and well. The cost of
this favoured department was shown to be most
moderate when its marvellous organisation was
considered, and its branches were proved to be
so wonderfully fitted to each other, as to command
our admiration, if only as a specimen of
highly finished administrative art.

Some curious questions suggested themselves,
it is true, as to the good wrought by this highly
finished mechanism. Deaths from starvation in
the streets; a torpid mass of poverty festering
through the country; old and feeble men and
women, and young and helpless children, both
preferring death to the cruel mercies of the
department; a system of rating so unjust as to
be little better than legalised theft, and an
organised jobbery so shameless as to defeat
exposure, were among its most familiar handiworks
We knew the poor to be ill-treated,
and we knew the money raised in their name by
those who " carried the bag " to be more than
sufficient for its purpose; and we wanted
information as to the terrible gap between
material and result. In place of this, readers of
the essay in question learnt that the wisest of
all possible laws, and the most perfect of all
possible departments, was the one having its
head-quarters at Whitehall; and that so long
as a numerous and costly staff drew up and
consolidated orders and regulations, issued
dignified minutes, and generally glorified itself, the
Poor-law Board must be regarded as the one
government establishment without blame.

Let us ask, on the strength of eleven years'
experience, whether any sane person believes
the present condition of the poor of England
could by any possibility be worse, if this
wonderful department bad been then swept
off the face of the earth? Has it not given a
tacit, but consistent, support to evil? And
would not the volunteer apostles of humanity
have performed their Christian task earlier but
for the solemn sham of inspections, minutes,
and reports which have been kept up? Had the
whole of our workhouses, and the entire
machinery of guardians, Bumbles, and boards been
left without nominal control, their abuses would
have been remedied long since. It is the
pretence of an authority properly exercised which
has wrought the nameless, shameless evils
the country shudders at, and which Mr. Ernest
Hart and his colleagues have dragged to light.
It is this pretence which must be exposed and
denounced until it gives way like the worthless
sham it is, and a better system, and a more
wholesome discipline, rise up in its stead.
Recent events augur favourably for this end.
With a fatuity which, we will hope, precedes
dissolution, the department has turned a deaf
ear to the signs of the times. After many fits
of spasmodic indignation, the spirit of the
country has been at last thoroughly roused,
and a reform which shall prevent venal, cruel,
and ignorant jobbers recklessly torturing the
suffering and the helpless, is firmly insisted on.
No one out of this office has the hardihood
to pretend that our workhouses are properly
managed, that guardians are sensible, humane,
or just, or that sick paupers are otherwise
than shamefully treated. For the Workhouse
Infirmary Association has succeeded in rousing
the attention of the country, and a general
impression is abroad that reform must be
speedy and complete. The Board has, however,
survived so many storms of popular
indignation, that it scarcely believes even now
that the nation is in earnest, or that its very
existence as a department depends upon its
conforming to the increased humanity of the age.
Pandering to the interests of the vulgar hucksters
who rule our metropolitan parishes is
thought a safer mode of meeting the difficulty
than honestly confessing what one president, at
all events, has admitted to be just. True to