The grim necessity of providing, after the events of the Boer War, for effective thought in the government of the British army produced the War Office Council. The Secretary of State, instead of knowing only of those suggestions that reach him through the 'bottle-neck' of his senior official's mind, now sits once a week at a table with half a dozen heads of sub-departments. He hears real discussion; he learns to pick men for higher work; and saves many hours of circumlocutory writing. At the same time, owing to a well-known fact in the physiology of the human brain, the men who are tired of thinking on paper find a new stimulus in the spoken word and the presence of their fellow human beings, just as politicians who are tired with talking, find, if their minds are still uninjured, a new stimulus in the silent use of a pen.
If this periodical alternation of written and oral discussion is useful in the War Office, it would probably be useful in other offices; but no one with sufficient authority to require an answer has ever asked if it is so.
One of the most important functions of a modern Government is the effective publication of information, but we have no Department of Publicity, though we have a Stationery Office; and it is, for instance, apparently a matter of accident whether any particular Department has or has not a Gazette and how and when that Gazette is published. Nor is it any one's business to discover and criticise and if necessary co-ordinate the statistical methods of the various official publications.
On all these points and many others a small Departmental Committee (somewhat on the lines of that Esher Committee which reorganised the War Office in 1904), consisting perhaps of an able manager of an Insurance Company, with an open-minded Civil Servant, and a business man with experience of commercial and departmental organisation abroad, might suggest such improvements as would without increase of expense double the existing intellectual output of our Government offices.
But such a Committee will not be appointed unless the ordinary members of parliament, and especially the members who advocate a wide extension of collective action, consider much more seriously than they do at present the organisation of collective thought. How, for instance, are we to prevent or minimise the danger that a body of officials will develop 'official' habits of thought, and a sense of a corporate interest opposed to that of the majority of the people? If a sufficient proportion of the ablest and best equipped young men of each generation are to be induced to come into the Government service they must be offered salaries which place them at once among the well-to-do classes. How are we to prevent them siding consciously or unconsciously on all questions of administration with their economic equals? If they do, the danger is not only that social reform will be delayed, but also that working men in England may acquire that hatred and distrust of highly educated permanent officials which one notices in any gathering of working men in America.
We are sometimes told, now that good education is open to every one, that men of every kind of social origin and class sympathy will enter to an increasing extent the higher Civil Service. If that takes place it will be an excellent thing, but meanwhile any one who follows the development of the existing examination system knows that care is required to guard against the danger that preference in marking may, if only from official tradition, be given to subjects like Greek and Latin composition, whose educational value is not higher than others, but excellence in which is hardly ever acquired except by members of one social class.
It would, of course, be ruinous to sacrifice intellectual efficiency to the dogma of promotion from the ranks, and the statesmen of 1870 were perhaps right in thinking that promotion from the second to the first division of the service would be in their time so rare as to be negligible. But things have changed since then. The competition for the second division has become incomparably more severe, and there is no reasonable test under which some of those second class officials who have continued their education by means of reading and University teaching in the evening would not show, at thirty years of age, a greater fitness for the highest work than would be shown by many of those who had entered by the more advanced examination.
But however able our officials are, and however varied their origin, the danger of the narrowness and rigidity which has hitherto so generally resulted from official life would still remain, and must be guarded against by every kind of encouragement to free intellectual development. The German Emperor did good service the other day when he claimed (in a semi-official communication on the Tweedmouth letter) that the persons who are Kings and Ministers in their official capacity have as Fachmänner (experts) other and wider rights in the republic of thought. One only wishes that he would allow his own officials after their day's work to regroup themselves, in the healthy London fashion, with labour leaders, and colonels, and schoolmasters, and court ladies, and members of parliament, as individualists or socialists, or protectors of African aborigines, or theosophists, or advocates of a free stage or a free ritual.
The intellectual life of the government official is indeed becoming part of a problem which every year touches us all more closely. In literature and science as well as in commerce and industry the independent producer is dying out and the official is taking his place. We are nearly all of us officials now, bound during our working days, whether we write on a newspaper, or teach in a university, or keep accounts in a bank, by restrictions on our personal freedom in the interest of a larger organisation. We are little influenced by that direct and obvious economic motive which drives a small shopkeeper or farmer or country solicitor to a desperate intensity of scheming how to outstrip his rivals or make more profit out of his employees. If we merely desire to do as little work and enjoy as much leisure as possible in our lives, we all find that it pays us to adopt that steady unanxious 'stroke' which neither advances nor retards promotion.
The indirect stimulus, therefore, of interest and variety, of public spirit and the craftsman's delight in his skill, is becoming more important to us as a motive for the higher forms of mental effort, and threats and promises of decrease or increase of salary less important. And because those higher efforts are needed not only for the advantage of the community but for the good of our own souls we are all of us concerned in teaching those distant impersonal masters of ours who are ourselves how to prevent the opportunity of effective thought from being confined to a tiny rich minority, living, like the Cyclops, in irresponsible freedom. If we consciously accept the fact that organised work will in future be the rule and unorganised work the exception, and if we deliberately adjust our methods of working as well as our personal ideals to that condition, we need no longer feel that the direction of public business must be divided between an uninstructed and unstable body of politicians and a selfish and pedantic bureaucracy.