as an Oxford scholar is set out with other men’s goods when he goes out of town, and that he makes every sort of tradesman to bribe him; and invited me home to his house, to taste of his bribe wine.”[29] Sometimes, indeed, Pepys became involved in transactions where the “King’s interest,” as he measured it, received less than its due share of attention. We find him fearing investigation in such cases, and withdrawing from them with the resolution not to allow himself to become similarly involved again. Yet on the whole there is every evidence of a conscious feeling on his part of rectitude superior to the administrative morals of the time. That it was largely justified in spite of the receipt of gifts may be seen from Dr. Wheatley’s comment to the effect that “public men in those days, without private property, must have starved if they had not taken fees, for the King had no idea of wasting his money by paying salaries. At the time of Pepys’s death there was a balance of £28,007, 2 _s._ 1¼ _d._ due to him from the Crown, and the original vouchers still remain an heirloom in the family.”[30] Appointments to public office have been a fruitful field for corruption in many forms. In his “Civil Service in Great Britain,” Mr. Dorman B. Eaton sums up the whole history of the disposal of patronage in England in the following statement:—“From the despotic system, under the Norman kings, through various spoils systems under arbitrary kings—through a sort of partisan system under Cromwell—through fearful corruption under James and Charles—through a sort of aristocratic spoils system under William and Anne—through a partisan spoils system under George I. and II., and a part of the reign of George III.—through the partisan system in its best estate in later years—we have traced the unsteady but generally ascending progress of British administration; and, in 1870, we shall find it to have reached a level at which office is treated as a trust and personal merit is the recognised criterion of selection for office.”[31] It would be a most absurd anachronism to regard all the earlier practices referred to by Mr. Eaton with the horror of a modern civil service reformer. Richard the Lion-Hearted could hardly have comprehended the advantage of competitive literary examinations open to all classes of his subjects as a means of selecting his subordinates. When under the Plantagenets and Tudors “charters and monopolies, in a fit of good nature, were tossed by a king to some borough, great officer, or favourite that had pleased him; and, in a fit of anger or drunkenness—as arbitrarily revoked,”[32] it must be remembered that neither the law nor the morals of the time severely condemned such actions. No wonder, therefore, that “the old system was bold, consistent, and outspoken—not pretending to make selections for office out of regard for personal merit or economy, or the general welfare. It plainly asserted that