The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

Sir George Kekewich was, however, the only practical man of the whole bunch. He said that “jobbery will never be eliminated from the Civil Service, nor the most efficient men placed at its head, nor the way opened for merit from the very bottom to the very top, until there is established a proper Board of Promotion.” In a previous number of the same magazine was published a series of explanations of “Success in Literature” by prominent literary men, and it was interesting to notice how candid and genuine and modest were the confessions compared with those of the distinguished Civil Servants. The Civil Servant, even when he is a retired official, seems unable to use his pen without experiencing the necessity to be cautious and commonplace. We can almost hear him saying to himself: “The Civil Service, as we know it, is an organised hypocrisy. But we must not give the show away: we must talk to the public as we used to talk to our subordinates: we must uphold the supremacy of the copybooks.”