The Select Committee on Expenditure, which must by now be
a name of fear unpleasing in an official's ear, has turned its searchlight on the Ministry of Information. The Committee's sixth Report, issued last Saturday, shows that three distinct new Departments or Bureaux were engaged in war propaganda until they were absorbed into the new Ministry under Lord Beaverbrook in March last. These Departments spent a great deal of money—some of it on useless books and articles, and some of it on lavish entertaining—and were not properly controlled by the Treasury. A Member of Parliament had-been paid £30 a month for expenses. The Assistant-Director of Finance and the Accounting Officer at the Ministry, which has a staff of four hundred and eighty-five persons, said that the expendi- ture for 1918-19 would be over £1,800,000, and was likely to in- crease. Lord Beaverbrook himself said that he hoped to reduce the year's expenditure to £1,200,000, and that he had called in a char- tered accountant to put the Ministry's accounts in order. The original Department of information has, we see, been blamed, though not by the Committee, for showing a "lack of imagination." Surely that is the very last thing to be said of the author of Greennaantle and The Thirty-nine Steps
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