Ranking below the Class I clerkships, there is a large body of persons whose work is mainly clerical. These are known as the second division clerks, and they are recruited by open competition. The standard of education required by the examination is naturally much less high than in the case of the first-class clerks, and the candidates are consequently younger, the competition being now limited to youths between seventeen and twenty years of age.[165:2] [Sidenote: Nature of Examinations.] As the work done by the second division is of the same general character as that performed by clerks in commercial houses, the examination was at first devised on the supposition that the candidates would have a commercial training, and it was adapted to test their immediate fitness for that work. Besides the elementary general subjects of writing, English composition, arithmetic, geography and English history, it covered copying, indexing, digesting returns and bookkeeping. Such a test was not inappropriate in the earlier days, when appointments were made by nomination and the object of the examination was simply to eliminate individual appointees who were unfit for their duties; but it was continued long after the system of open competition, with its crowd of eager young candidates almost devoid of actual commercial training, had brought in a very different state of things. In 1896 the Association of Head Masters pointed out, in a memorandum, the bad effect produced on general education. They showed that, in order to improve their chance of success, boys were prematurely taken from school and placed in the hands of crammers to acquire "a high degree of polish upon a rather low though useful order of accomplishment"; and they asked that the examination might be brought more into line with the curriculum of the schools. This was done, without giving up the former methods altogether, by introducing a number of options, so that a candidate need offer only the subjects ordinarily taught in a secondary school.[166:1] The result in the future will no doubt be to make proficiency in regular school work the real test for appointment, and thus, in accordance with Macaulay's principle, to base the selection upon general education instead of technical knowledge.