A Great Public Servant
With the retirement of Sir Alexander Maxwell, Permanent Under- Secretary of the Home Office, WRitehall will lose one of the ablest, as well as the most untiring, civil servants it has known for a long time. Entering the Home Office in 1904, when Mr. Aretas Akers- Douglas was Home Secretary, Sir Alexander has in different capaci- ties given loyal and invaluable service to chiefs as varied as Mr. McKenna, Mr. Churchill, Lord Samuel, Mr. Clynes, Lord Temple. wood, Mr. Morrison and Mr. Chuter Ede. He did particularly useful work as Chairman of the Prison Commissioners between 1928 and 1932, and played a large part in the preparation not only of the Criminal Justice Bill which has just become an Act, but of the earlier and hardly less important, measure introduced by Sir Samuel Hoare too near the otubreak of war in 1939 to enable it to become law. Relatively little known to the general public, for he is one of the most self-effacing of officials, the Under-Secretary has in all his functions maintained a conspicuously humane attitude which has kept his department's reputation consistently high in such matters as relations with aliens, when relapse into bureaucracy would have offered an easy way out of many difficulties. Though he reached pension-age eight years ago, he remained at his post through the arduous years of the war and its aftermath, and goes now only when the Criminal Justice Act is safe on the Statute-book. Few men have had a longer record of service in Whitehall, and none a more honourable one.
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