those in power had a right and duty to keep themselves in power and preserve their monopoly in any way which their judgement should approve, and that the people were bound to submit.”[33] Further “the right to appoint to office and to sell the appointment openly for money became also, and long remained, hereditary; sometimes in great families and sometimes in the holder for the time being of the offices themselves.”[34] No doubt the exercise of such rights of purchase was once regarded generally as no more objectionable than the sale of a private physician’s practice or the sale of the good will of a business at the present time. But while the various earlier methods of disposing of the patronage as sketched by Mr. Eaton must be judged with reference to contemporary political morality, it is true that each of them in turn fell into disrepute, was abolished—often only after several trials—and finally superseded by a less faulty system. Even as far back as Magna Charta the existence of a faint conception of the modern civil service principle is made plain by the Forty-fifth Article, according to which the King engaged not to “make any justices, constables, sheriffs, or bailiffs, but of such as know the law of the realm.” All the great subsequent uprisings of English history were directed in part against certain other abuses of the corrupt patronage system. The Tyler and Cade Rebellions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the great Civil War, the expulsion of James II., the overthrow of Walpole, the failure of George III.’s attempt at personal government,—each marked a higher standard of public sentiment on the question. Between 1820 and 1870, the great modern civil service reform orders were passed, resulting in the final establishment of open competition for over 80,000 positions under the English government. Opportunities for corrupt practices in connection with appointment to office are, of course, not entirely excluded even by so thoroughgoing a system as that which now exists in England, but they are few and unimportant indeed compared to the possibilities of selfish abuses under former régimes.