Excerpt from Labour and Life of the People, Vol. 8 Not only does he work for a master whose business is subject to no vicissitudes of fortune, but his security of tenure is far greater than that of the servant of a private employer; the private trader is obviously much more directly interested in the efficiency of his servants than the head of a Government department; and there is a still stronger reason which militates against the dismissal of a civil servant, and that is that heads of departments have always before them the fear that pressure may be brought to bear by Members of Parliament. The result is that a Government department is certainly more long-suffering than a private employer, and dismissal is not likely to result except from flagrant and repeated misconduct, or from the grossest incompetence. Se fully is this fact recognized that clerks and some other members of the service are only placed on the establishment after a period of probation. But even this security is probably not very effective, for the Lords of the Treasury point out that too much reliance must not be placed upon this security for obtaining competent civil servants. Heads oi' departments will, it must be anticipated, only refuse their certificate in cases of proved incapacity. The precaution is therefore a bar to incompetence, not a security for competence. In the case of lower division and boy clerks, however, advantage is sometimes taken of this mile to get rid of a clerk at the end of the period of probation, though in the vast majority of cases the cause assigned is bad health. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.