2 AUGUST 1873, Page 7

THE POST-OFFICE SCANDAL.

AFTER all, there is one pleasant feature in the history of the Post-Office Scandal. It is perfectly cer- tain that a sum of nearly a million of public money has been " mis-appropriated," — that is, has been used

for State purposes in a way which Parliament has not sanctioned, a practice condemned even in France, strictly forbidden in America, and held in England to be fatal to Par- liamentary control over expenditure. It is perfectly certain that Mr. Scudamore is the guilty man, for he avows the offence, is slightly proud of it, and uses as his only defence that he could not get along at the pace he liked without committing it. Scarcely any man in the public service who had done such a thing—that is, who had compelled a Chancellor of the Exchequer to attack a colleague, and brought the Cabinet into a serious Parliamentary difficulty—would have escaped without dismissal, but it is Mr. Scudamore's good fortune, and that of the country he serves, that for once in a way the Cabinet, the Houses, and the electors understand the truth about a secluded permanent official,—that they have got an irreplaceable ser- vant, a man who can both organise and govern, a man with an originating faculty in public business, a man who if he were in Parliament could not be kept a twelvemonth out of the Cabinet, and would probably in two years as Minister of Public Communications stand at the head of the Post Office, the Telegraphs, the Railways, and the Packet services all over the world. So nobody will touch him. He serves the State well, and that, in spite of all our growing habits of carping, and criticising, and analysing public men, till some of them must feel like Indians tied to a stake to be shot at by boys' arrows, is still a sufficient warranty for exceptional re- missness in abuse. There is no borough in England where Mr. Scudamore's great error in accounts would be flung in his teeth ; the speakers in the House of Commons on Tuesday night anxiously sheltered and complimented him ; the theory of Ministerial responsibility was pressed in his defence to its last limit, for after all, Parliament does virtually censure subordinates very often, and the Premier went out of his way to say that Mr. Scudamore had " committed a great error, overbalanced by still greater services." It is pleasant amid all the muddle to see that determination to protect and ac- knowledge the value of service which seeks as its only reward —for Mr. Scudamore is not paid in money quite a third of his value at auction as an administrator for great undertakings —more power to serve the State.

For the rest, the debate only bears out more strongly the view which we last week deduced from the papers laid before Parliament. Mr. Scudamore, in his burning zeal to make the new Telegraph system work, an object in which by universal consent he succeeded, changed his department from a sub- department of the Post Office to a department subordinate only to the Treasury. He had no earthly right to do anything of the kind, but if he did not do it the State would suffer, he was strong enough to do it, and he did it, with the passive or conscious consent of both his superiors,—the Postmaster- General and the Treasury. From the first to the last he communicated direct with the central office, without any objection from anybody. If he wanted anything, he wrote to Mr. Lowe. if Mr. Lowe, in a fit of formality, replied under cover to the Postmaster-General, the letter went to Mr. Scuda- more unread. On one occasion, when Mr. Lowe was complain- ing, Mr. Monsell did not know of the complaint until Mr. Scuda- more told him of it. Lord Hartington, who was at the time of the purchase of the Telegraphs Postmaster-General, either ap- proved or allowed the system ; Mr. Monsell found it, and never interfered ; and the Treasury knew it, and never interfered, for in 1872 Mr. Scudamore had a direct correspondence with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wrote about an overpayment, and condemns himself for laxity in not attending to the matter. Considering that he could have sent for Mr. Scudamore, and in five minutes' conversation have ascertained enough from him to form an opinion whether the sum was of a mag- nitude to make a stir about, we think the laxity very considerable indeed ; and so, too, thinks Mr. Lowe, for as Mr. Cross pointed out, with some humour and more force, it is avowed in the recital of the very Bill of Indemnity which the Chancellor of the Exchequer has introduced into Parliament,—" Whereas by the Telegraph Act, 1869, and the Telegraph Money Act, 1871, the Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury, in this Act referred to as the Treasury, were authorised to raise for the purposes of the said Acts any sum or sums of money not exceeding in the whole eight million pounds and whereas an estimated sum about £812,800, part of the Post-Office revenue which ought to have been paid into the Consolidated Fund, has been improperly expended for the purposes of the said Telegraph Acts, and it is necessary that funds should be provided to make good to the said Fund the sum so improperly diverted from it." Is not that final ? It is all very well to attack Mr. Monsell for " keeping in the shade," which he did a great deal too much, and Mr. Scudamore for sending in plausible accounts, which he did not, for as Mr. Lowe allows, be sometimes made out matters worse than they were; but Mr. Lowe was virtually Mr. Scudamore's chief throughout the business, the more so be- cause the very obvious impression in his own mind was that he himself and Mr. Scudamore must settle it, because Mr. Monad!, the Departmental Chief, was wanting in energy. He does not exactly say so, but his remark that " the Postmaster- General cannot be treated as head of his office, unless he wills to be so treated," can only bear that meaning. There is only one excuse to be made for him, and that he fails to make, namely, that he did not understand how there could be such an official as Mr. Scudamore in the world. He knew he was honest, and that he was competent ; but the possibility that he might risk his appointment by a gigantic departure from routine in order to perform a great service to the country—that, in fact, he rather despised for- mulas, and would go at his work as if he had been an Emperor—never occurred to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. If the over-expenditure had been £5,000, and the delinquents, say, the Trustees of the British Museum, he would have gone into the whole matter with a will, made the cheeks of everyone flame under rebuke, and stood up in Parliament the hard, merciless guardian of public interest against informality. As it was, he was of no more use than an account-book.

The House of Commons, with its usual instinct for jus- tice, or rather for business, rejected Mr. Cross's resolu- tion, which censured both Post Office and Treasury, and by a majority of 50 in a House of 272 Members accepted Sir John Lubbock's, which only regrets the employment of Trust funds without sanction, and warns Government to stop a recurrence of the proceeding, a warning which this debate will most effectually and deservedly give. For although we hold, as we have said, that Mr. Scudamore sinned from zeal, and Mr. Monsell from over-careless confi- dence in a system he found existing, and Mr. Lowe from the " laxity " he admits—laxity inspired by his entire disbelief that anybody could be so dreadfully energetic at such a risk as Mr. Scudamore—still the practice itself cannot be too energetically reprobated. Suppose Mr. Roupell, also an ex- tremely energetic person, had been in Mr. Scudamore's place. A department with new business to do may want money, and money in very great sums ; but then Parliament should be asked for them, or if that is impossible—as, for instance, when the mere knowledge that Government is in the market would double prices—the order for borrowing should be sanc- tioned by the whole Cabinet and justified by a Bill of Indem- nity. Less than this will never guard the Treasury from the sort of risk it must run in all great constructive operations, in which it has no right to reckon that a " clerk," as Mr. Bernal Osborne, in the first gush of hearty slangy abuse to which he has given way this Session, called Mr. Scudamore, acting for a moment as leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, may be trusted like a Member of the Cabinet. The country will certainly not trust any head of the Railways in that style, and it is as well to begin our new tasks with a little more rigidity.