It is noticeable also that these six new experts are
to form a "Staff Committee" under the chairmanship of the Secretary of State, and that this Committee will succeed to the functions of Mr. Cordell Hull's old "Policy Committee.4 The Secretary of State is, in fact, providing himself with a trained and permanent General Staff. He will have beside him both a thinking department, a planning department and a department of co-ordination. The over- sectionalised system on which the State Department used to function will in this way be abolished. In its place you will have a body of men who, while not being overburdened with departmental duties, will be able to think, foresee, plan and guide. A similar insti- tutional problem has for long been engaging the minds of those who, foreseeing the need of equal co-ordination and definition in British Foreign Policy, have for long questioned whether the Foreign Office is -adequately adapted to the machinery of a modern -State. The interesting debates which took place in the House of Lords in July, 194r, in November, 1941, in March, 1943, and again in March of this year, indicate that many of our retired diplomatists and states- men are perturbed by the decline in recent years of the authority which in any State the Foreign Office ought to exercise, and that many suggestions have been made as to the means by which the relationship between the Foreign Office, the -Cabinet and -the other departments could be placed upon a more reasonable and co- ordinated footing. The problem is one which deserves careful examination. It can perhaps be defined in the following terms.
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