Stafford Northcote

“ Hardy was a more forcible and rousing speaker, but Northcote had more varied accomplishments and a fuller mastery of official work. Disraeli said that he had “the largest parliamentary knowledge of any man he had met.”
As an administrator, Sir Stafford Northcote was diligent, judicious, and free from any taint of jobbery. He sought nothing for himself; did not abuse his patronage; kept the public interests steadily before his mind. He was considerate to his subordinates, and gracious to all 214 men. He never grudged labour, although there might be no prospect of winning credit by it. ”

“ The plague of it is that he never succeeds except when he reasons like a man of sense, and weapons forged on this anvil are too blunt to pierce the thick hide of impudence.
No evil has befallen Sir Stafford Northcote but such as is common to men. ”

“ Lowther is daring, but not always fortunate in his daring." They may all stand aside. It is clear that none of the six will do. There is Mr. Gibson, but "he is a lawyer and an Irishman of the Irish." As for Sir Stafford Northcote, he is a respectable man, with a host of respectable qualities, but "he is too amiable for his ambition, which is great, and in trying to play a double part, that of caution and daring, he is at times taxed beyond his strength." ”

“ Miss Nightingale determined to wait no longer. She announced her determination in a letter to Captain Galton (May 28, 1867) . He was in touch with Indian sanitary business as a member of the War Office Sanitary Committee, to which such business was often referred, and she attached considerable weight to his judgment. “Our Indian affairs,” she wrote, “are getting as drunk as they can be”; she was resolved to have them put straight. She had been “strongly advised to communicate direct with Sir Stafford Northcote” ”

“ Like their contemporaries, the French Jansenists, and the Quakers and Anabaptists of northern Europe, the Quietists fell back on a doctrine of immediate inspiration of the individual conscience. To the many God spoke only in general terms through the Church; but to the few He made His will directly known. But how did He do so? How distinguish the voice of God from the vagaries of our own imagination? Quietism offered an easy test. The less “sense of proprietorship” a man had in his own good actions the more they came from a source outside himself-the surer might he be that they were divine. ”

“ A young man who has not made trial of any other profession will be induced to enter that of the Civil Service by a much more moderate remuneration than would suffice to attract him a few years later from the pursuit of one in which he had overcome the first difficulties and begun to achieve success; while to attempt to fill the ranks of the Civil Service with those who had failed elsewhere, and were on that account willing to accept a moderate salary, would be simply to bring it into discredit. ”

“ Hence arose the great Quietist doctrine of disinterested love. “The Quietists maintain,” says a contemporary writer, “that Christian perfection means a love of God so absolutely free from all desire of happiness that it is indifferent to salvation. The soul is moved neither by hope nor fear, nor even by the foretaste of eternal bliss. Its only motive is to do the will and promote the glory of God. ”

“ A staff of assistant examiners might be formed; or the services of competent men might be engaged from time to time, or recourse might be had to the machinery of the Education Department of the Privy Council, for the purpose of holding district examinations at stated periods. ”

“ Here he argues that the more love we have for ourselves, the less we can spare for our Maker. Perfection lies in getting rid of self-hood altogether—in never thinking of ourselves, or even of the relation in which God stands to us. The saint does not love Christ as his Redeemer, but only as the Redeemer of the human race. Bossuet (q.v.) attacked this position as inconsistent with Christianity. Fénelon promptly appealed to Rome, and after two years of bitter controversy his book was condemned by Innocent XII. in 1699. As to the merits of the controversy opinion will always be divided. ”

“ Among the Quietists both these checks disappear, and passivity becomes the one and only test of holiness. But if passivity is all in all, there is no room for the Virtues of the active life; all Quietists cherished the ancient saying that one moment’s contemplation is worth a thousand years’ good works. Still less room had they for the Church. It only professed to guide men to God ”

“ Even in an open profession a consciousness of unrecognized merit will sometimes weigh a man down, though he has always the hope that the justice which is denied him in one quarter will be done to him in another. ”

“ Quietism is an outgrowth from the mysticism of the great 16th-century Spaniards, St Teresa and St John of the Cross, though it would be unfair to hold them responsible for all the utterances of their disciples. Certainly St Teresa made much of “passivity,” but she only regarded it as a refuge for a few specially constituted souls; whereas the Quietists designedly brought it within the reach of everyone. In St Teresa the passivity itself was balanced by a strong attachment to the virtues of the active life, and an equally strong devotion to the Church. ”

“ It remains for us to express our conviction that if any change of the importance of those which we have recommended is to be carried into effect, it can only be successfully done through the medium of an Act of Parliament. ”

“ It does not attract the ablest men. It would be natural to expect that so important a profession would attract into its ranks the ablest and the most ambitious of the youth of the country; that the keenest emulation would prevail among those who had entered it; and that such as were endowed with superior qualifications would rapidly rise to distinction and public eminence. ”

“ Nay, the soul must be ready to renounce its hopes of heaven, 'and the scrupulous will often feel themselves bound to do so; for in the last and fiercest trials they are invincibly persuaded of their own damnation. ”

“ St Cyran’s character has been always something of a puzzle. Many excellent contemporary judges were profoundly impressed; others, as one of them said, went away bewildered by this strange abbé, who never argued a question out, but leapt from one point to another in broken, incoherent phrases. Grace of expression he had none; perhaps no man of equal spiritual insight ever found it so hard to make his meaning clear, whether on paper or by word of mouth. ”

“ How best to obtain proper men for the public service. Having thus touched upon some of the difficulties with which the public service is beset, we come to the consideration of the problem, What is the best method of providing it with a supply of good men, and of making the most of them after they have been admitted?
The first question which here presents itself is, Whether it is better to train young men for the discharge of the duties which they will afterwards have to perform, or to take men of mature age, who have already acquired experience in other walks of life? ”

“ Lastly, even supposing every other circumstance to be favourable, it is impossible that each department, acting for itself, can come to such just conclusions in regard to the nature of the preliminary examination, or can conduct it in such a fair, and effective, and consistent manner, as would persons having the advantage of a general view of the subject as it affects every public department, and who should have been selected for the duty on account of their experience in matters of this description. ”

“ But a purely controversial writer is seldom attractive to posterity. Anxiety to drive home every possible point, and cut his adversary off from every possible line of retreat, makes him seem intolerably prolix. “In spite of myself,” Arnauld once said regretfully, “my books are seldom very short.” And even lucidity may prove a snare to those who trust to it alone, and scornfully refuse to appeal to the imagination or the feelings. ”

“ The effect naturally is, to cramp the energies of the whole body, to encourage the growth of narrow views and departmental prejudices, to limit the acquisition of experience, and to repress and almost extinguish the spirit of emulation and competition ”

“ That the Permanent Civil Service, with all its defects, essentially contributes to the proper discharge of the functions of Government, has been repeatedly admitted by those who have successively been responsible for the conduct of our affairs. ”

“ In those cases in which the patronage of departments belongs to their chief for the time being, the appointments which it commonly falls to his lot to make are either those of junior clerks, to whom no very important duties are in the first instance to be assigned, or of persons who are to fill responsible and highly paid situations above the rank of the ordinary clerkships. ”

“ Protestantism had tried to put an end to this state of things by sweeping away the Church altogether, but the Quietists were more tolerant than Luther. They did not wish to abolish the Church; they admitted that it was a necessary stage in the evolution of the human soul; but' they insisted that it could only bring a man on to the lowest slopes of Paradise. Those who aspired to be really holy must learn to look beyond the Church, and enter into immediate, personal relations with their Maker. ”

“ It is of course essential to the public service that men of the highest abilities should be selected for the highest posts; and it cannot be denied that there are a few situations in which such varied talent and such an amount of experience are required, that it is probable that under any circumstances it will occasionally be found necessary to fill them with persons who have distinguished themselves elsewhere than in the Civil Service. ”

“ But in the heat of battle with Bossuet, Fénelon carried his principles beyond all reasonable bounds. The theme of his Maxims; is that, as men grow in holiness they become utterly indifferent to themselves. Not only do they cease to covet the consolations of religion; they lose all incidental pleasure in its exercise. ”

“ Bossuet can only be thought of as the high-priest of authority and common-sense; but Fénelon has been made by turns into a sentimentalist, a mystical saint, an 18th-century philosophe, an ultramontane churchman and a hysterical hypocrite. ”

“ There are, however, numerous honourable exceptions to these observations, and the trustworthiness of the entire body is unimpeached. They are much better than we have any right to expect from the system under which they are appointed and promoted. ”

“ The character of the young men admitted to the public service depends chiefly upon the discretion with which the heads of departments, and others who are entrusted with the distribution of patronage, exercise that privilege. ”

“ Luther had already broken through one link in this chain, when he taught the Protestant world to come directly to Jesus, without troubling about the Church; but Luther still assumed that God could only be reached through the intermediacy of Jesus. Molinos wished to find a royal road to God without any intermediaries at all. The Reformation maintained that the Church, so far from being a help, was a hindrance, to union with Jesus; whereas Molinos welcomed both Church and Jesus as helps to union with God, always provided that the believer treated both as means to an end beyond themselves. ”

“ The effect of the system of departmental patronage has been to inspire the clerks in each office with a feeling of jealousy towards any one who is supposed to enjoy the especial favour of the chief of the department, or, still more, of the principal permanent officer in it. Constituted as our official system now is, men feel, and not unreasonably, that the recognition of their merits, even within their own departments, is extremely uncertain, and that there is no appeal to any public tribunal if injustice is done them there. ”

“ The want of encouragement in the form of good service pensions and honorary distinctions, is also severely felt in the ordinary Civil branch of the public service, which is the only one in which these classes of reward are not dispensed. ”

“ If the opinions of the gentlemen engaged in the Civil Service could be taken on the subject of promotion, it would probably be found that a very large majority of them would object strongly to what is called promotion by merit. ”

“ More than most men, Fénelon “wanders between two worlds—one dead, the other powerless to be born.” He came just at a time when the characteristic ideas of the 17th century—the ideas of Louis XIV., of Bossuet and Boileau—had lost their savour, and before another creed could arise to take their place. Hence, like most of those who break away from an established order, he seems by turns a revolutionist and a reactionary. Such a man expresses his ideas much better by word of mouth than in the cold formality of print ”

“ Why it is unfitted to be a test of sanctity in general has been explained at length by Bossuet in a remarkable Instruction sur les états d’oraison, published while the Quietist controversy was at its height. ”

“ Superior appointments given to strangers.The result naturally is, that when the chief of the office has to make an appointment of visible and immediate importance to the efficiency of his department, he sometimes has difficulty in finding a clerk capable of filling it, and he is not unfrequently obliged to go out of the office, and to appoint some one of high standing in an open profession, or some one distinguished in other walks of life, over the heads of men who have been for many years in the public service. ”