i6z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ing in literature in this fashion; and I do not see any difficulty be- 

 yond the initial repugnance of the professors of languages to be em- 

 ployed in this task, and the fear, on the part of candidates, that undue 

 stress might be placed on points that need a knowledge of originals. 



I will conclude with a remark on the apparent tendency of the 

 wide options in the commissioners' scheme. No one subject is obli- 

 gatory ; and the choice is so wide that by a very narrow range of 

 acquirements a man may sometimes succeed. No doubt, as a rule, it 

 requires a considerable mixture of subjects : both sciences and litera- 

 ture have to be included. But I find the case of a man entering the 

 India service by force of languages alone, which I cannot but think a 

 miscarriage. Then the very high marks assigned to mathematics 

 allow a man to win with no other science, and no other culture, but a 

 middling examination in English. To those that think so highly of 

 foreign languages, this must seem a much greater anomaly than it 

 does to me. I would prefer, however, that such a candidate had trav- 

 ersed a wider field of science, instead of excelling in high mathemat- 

 ics alone. 



There are, I should say, three great regions of study that should 

 be fairly represented by every successful candidate. The first is the 

 sciences as a whole, in the form and order that I have suggested. The 

 second is English composition, in which successful men in the India 

 competition sometimes show a cipher. The third is what I may call 

 loosely the humanities, meaning the department of institutions and 

 history, with perhaps literature : to be computed in any of the regions 

 of ancient and modern history. In every one of these three depart- 

 ments I would fix a minimum below which the candidate must not 

 fall. 



ON THE COMPARATIVE STUPIDITY OF POLITICIANS. 1 



WE owe an apology to a very respectable class of persons for 

 the apparent, but we trust only apparent, and certainly invol- 

 untary, discourtesy of the thesis to which we invite attention. The 

 late Mr. Mill, in a well-known passage, called the Conservatives the 

 stupid party. We do not call them so, nor their opponents. All we 

 venture to assert of both is, that in a universe of graduated intelli- 

 gence they are not highest in the scale. The great majority of even 

 prominent politicians have just the gifts which make a man conspicu- 

 ous in a town-council or a board of guardians : physical energy, moral 

 persistency, and ideas on a level with those of their fellows. Miss 

 Martineau, in her very candid " Autobiography," has recorded her 

 sense of the mental and moral inferiority of the political men with 



1 Condensed from Frascr's Magazine. 



