2 - From the Northcote–Trevelyan Report to the Order in Council of 1870

Summary

Among the many benefits of the [Northcote–Trevelyan Report] there is none which I contemplate with so much gratification as the effect it is likely to have in giving our rural population a motive to educate their children, thus bringing the standards of cultivation in the country nearer to a level with that in the towns, at the same time that the religious and moral training are more attended to by owing more perfectly carrying out of the parochial system in the rural districts and to the influence and exertions of our country gentlemen & clergymen and their families.

Charles Trevelyan

I have looked carefully and thought over the plan for the organization of the permanent Civil Service, and I must confess that of all the social reforms of our day, I have never seen one that comes home to my own feelings & recommends itself to me as this one does, by the practical good which must result from its being effectively carried out in all departments of the Civil Service.

Richard Dawes, Dean of Hereford

The history of liberty has largely been the observance of procedural safeguards.

Felix Frankfurter

DAWES's praise for the Northcote–Trevelyan Report pointed toward Frankfurter's conclusion about the history of liberalism as the history of processes and procedures. The Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1854) and the Order in Council of 1870 created a secular clerisy which filled the consti¬tutional vacuum opened by the repeal of the Test and Corporations Acts, Catholic emancipation, and the removal of Jewish disabilities. A generation ago, scholarly literature was filled with ambitious research programs to consider the role of the state and its interventions into social life during a period of industrial change between 1825 and 1875. Taking their starting point with A.V. Dicey's influential Law and Opinion, scholars assiduously pursued various leads to track the growth of government which, in scholarly retrospect, seems now more limited than it did then. Whatever its shape and contours, the state in the middle quarters of the nineteenth century was constrained by “a highly pluralistic, patrician culture of authority that was committed to free trade, local self-government, voluntary service, and philanthropy.”