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with caution. 5 Professional standards may have been required, but the rules and practices of selection were fluid. Like their predecessor, the third earl Grey, ministers still sought out men of exceptional ability to fill critical appointments—as Grey had found essential in British North America—where the conventions of responsible government were worked out or when crises arose in former slave colonies. In the first Colonial Office List of 1862, amid detailed rules and regulations, the “distribution of the patronage of the Government” by secretary of state or governor is still expressly recognized. 6
This point of the continuity of preferment in the midst of civil service reform can be illustrated best from the pattern of appointments for Gordon's immediate predecessors in all his posts. From 1847 in New Brunswick, earl Grey's policy was applied with the appointment of Sir Edmund Head, a former poor-law commissioner who went on to become governor-general of Canada, followed by the Hon. J. H. T. Manners-Sutton, son of viscount Canterbury and an under-home secretary prior to his series of governorships in New Brunswick, Trinidad, and Victoria. In the crown colonies, military appointments were ended in Trinidad by 1857, when R. W. Keate, son of the president of the London College of Surgeons, succeeded as governor; and they ended in Mauritius when Sir Henry Barkly, a former politician, arrived in 1863 from posts in Jamaica and Victoria and moved on later to Cape Colony. Typically, too, Sir Hercules Robinson, son of an admiral and a talented civil servant in Ireland, was promoted overseas through the influence of his father-in- law, viscount Valentia, to a series of colonial governorships in the 1850s and 1860s, before preparing the way for Gordon by negotiating the annexation of Fiji in 1874 and preceding him to New Zealand. In Ceylon, the long rule of the military in crown colonies ended earlier than elsewhere with the appointment in 1831 of Sir Robert Wilmot-Horton, politician and sometime under-secretary for war and colonies in the last decade of his life. Thereafter, a series of distinguished civilians also ended their careers as rulers of the island (James Alexander Mackenzie, viscount Torrington, Sir George Anderson, Sir W. H. Gregory). It was a rare event, indeed, when Sir James Longdon was promoted to the