Character Assessment in State Service
| Author | B. W. Walker Watson |
| Date | 01 July 1931 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1931.tb02899.x |
| Published date | 01 July 1931 |
Character Assessment
in
State
Service
By
B.
W.
WALKER
WATSON
[Being
the
Winning
Essay
in
the Haldane Essay Competition,
1930-193
1
1
44
WE
want power to drive the ponderous State,” wrote Emerson.
Again,
“
There is no end to the sufficiency
of
character.
It
can afford to wait; it can do without what is called success; it cannot
but succeed.” But the State cannot afford to let the man
of
character
wait. In its own interest it must needs track him down and elevate
him, not indeed for his special good, but for the good
of
all.
Para-
doxically, the State
is
impersonal, yet it must ever be urgently seeking
a
person, one who shall best express that impersonality.
In the past there have been great civil servants, although the State
held no organised search to establish them. But that
was
in
the
days
when the crowd was small and the individual apparent.
As
the cen-
tury
turned, the crowd was becoming
a
“
horde
of
Government
officials
”
with
the individual more and more indistinguishable from
the mass, and elementary methods
of
selection were seen to be failing.
The impasse was reached when, after the War, vast numbers
of
ex-
Service men were retained by the State
in
civil employment, and
in
the absence
of
any organised system of personal valuation
the
problem
of
character assessment promised to become insoluble. Thus
it
came about that the first real attempt was made to analyse, tabulate
and evaluate the various
qualities
which were thought to indicate
the measure of fitness to serve
the
State.
On the 31st
of
March,
1922,
the National Whitley Council for
the
Civil Service approved
a
standard
form
of
character report which
was
to
act
as
a
guide
to the Departments
in
determining eligibility
for promotion. It is the purpose
of
this
paper to review
this
instru-
ment
in
the light of experience, to disclose its serious inadequacy to
achieve the end
in
view and to offer
a
more efficient alternative. The
official destiny of very many thousands depends entirely upon the
manner
in
which the promotion system
is
conceived and operated,
whilst the State
is
equally interested
in
seeing that all the vital points
in
its machinery are furnished
with
the efficient power which
is
character.
On what principles
should
such
a
system
be
grounded? Should
we invoke the aid of Mr. Bernard
Shaw’s
psychometrist,
or
the
psychologist, or the literary examiner, or our own higher officials?
301
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