THE CIVIL SERVICE.
It is impossible to overrate the services thus rendered to taking, and the unwillingness of the Minister to listen to the political head of a Department. It is not only at a his remonstrance may have been the direct cause of what Minister's first entrance upc;:i office that the permanent happened. The Civil servant who gets censured by the officials are so useful to him. Then indeed, as the Prince of public has only to defend himself in writing, or if Wales justly said, their advice and assistance are of in- that seems too dangerous, to get some one else to estimable value. But all through a Minister's career they do the writing for him, and the blame would be shifted are useful to hiui in innumerable ways, and then when his to the shoulders of those to whom it really belongs. time for retirement comes they are equally useful to his But the Civil servant rightly prefers to remain silent. He successor. They supply the premisses from which different knows .that the blame is part of his day's work, and does Ministers draw different conclusions, and they supply them not think of fixing it on any one else. Plainly this is the to all alike with equal cheerfulness and equal care. The only course that is compatible with that impersonal public service is to them something distinct from, and character which we have seen to be distinctive of the Civil higher than, the policy of any particular Government, and Service.. Either the Civil servant must be the "double" of in this way, to quote the Prince of Wales once more, his official superior, and be dismissed when that superior the country is sure of a continuity in its administration leaves office, or ho must be the simple mouthpiece of his independent of the inevitable changes of political parties.- superior, and hand on the orders given to him without Indeed, the party system, which with all its shortcomings expressing any opinion on their merits. In the one case is the only possible and the only healthy system for we have the French system, with its necessary epuration. England, could not flourish without the Civil Service, in the other we have the English system, with the efface- The real work of the country goes on untroubled by the ment of the Civil servant, and the consequent necessity of storms which agitate the surface of po]itics. There are changes of Ministry and changes of policy, but through- out them all the work of the country is carried on on the same principles and with the same honesty. This entire abstinence from politics so far as their official action is concerned is almost confined to England. We cannot con- ceive an English Minister speaking of the Civil Service THE NATIONAL AND SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE in the way in which M. Combos spoke of it in the French OF THE CORONATION SERVICE. Chamber the other day. The French ideal of official sub- ordination implies readiness to help the Government of MR. GLADSTONE in his famous book of essays upon the moment in every way that presents itself. Vast and "Church and State" counts the Coronation Service all-embracing as the French official hierarchy is, it has none among the signs whereby the religion of the nation is of that independence of the actual Ministers which we associate with the English Civil Service. If there is not writes:—" It may with truth be said that the gorgeous trappings, that personal revolution which might be expected to follow and even the magnificent pile within which it is performed, every charge of Government, it is only because for some are far less imposing than the grandeur of its language and the time past in France changes of Government have not meant profound and affecting truth of its idea." What is the idea changes of policy. Ministries have been more or less underlying this courtly and splendid ceremony ? We believe Radial!, but the differences between them have turned less it to be the same as that which more than two thousand upon principles than upon the extent to which it is expe- years ago underlay the Coronation ceremonial of a Jewish dient to give those principles immediate effect. The only Bing—the idea of a covenant—" a covenant between the rrHE Prince of Wales showed very plainly at the annual dinner of the Civil Service that a speaker may have no intimate knowledge of his subject and yet by instinct or good fortune go straight to the very heart of it. One of the great characteristics of the Civil Service, the Prince said, is its silence, and especially its silence under criticism. The permanent servants of the Crown, at least in the higher Departments, do not talk about their work. They do not even get their friends to talk about it for them. Whenever public affairs are specially important, there will always be kindly people who will bethink them of the increased labour that must devolve upon Ministers. They can pity a Secretary of State or a Chancellor of the Exchequer, but their sympathy goes no further. The men who have to see that the Minister has his facts and his figures ready to his hand, that he knows exactly when he may speak confidently and when he must use caution, are not often remembered. The speech that flows so glibly from the Minister's lips, the judicious arrangement of a mass of matter which less cleverly treated would only send his audience to sleep, the closely reasoned demonstration that makes the Government case seem unanswerable—at all events until it has been answered--these are the things that win credit for the speaker. Yet his own part in all this may be but a small one. He makes a clever use of the material supplied him by others, and these others are the permanent staff of his office. It is they who do the real work, they who are at hand whenever he needs infor- mation, they to whom he applies for that information with entire confidence that it will be forthcoming, they who have made his calculations for him and worked out the problems of which he Will communicate the solution. result of a change of Ministry has been that the repre. sentatives of authority throughout the country have found their action a little moderated or a little stimulated. The reason why there has been so marked a difference of tone in the accession of M. Combos to office is that the new Cabinet is decidedly more Radical than any that have of late been in power. Consequently there is a natural dis- position on the part of the Prime Minister to emphasise the service he expects from his subordinates. Under other chiefs lukewarm Radicalism may have been tolerated, but it will not be tolerated under M. Combos.
On the difference in this respect of the English Civil Service Mr. Morley is an excellent witness. The Civil Service as a whole is naturally Conservative. Its special training and special knowledge dispose it to distrust and to dislike changes. For changes interfere with the regu- larity and uniformity which are essential to good Depart- mental work. and what men think bad for themselves they naturally think bad for other people. When Mr. Morley became Minister, he came, as ho said at the dinner, for the purpose of carrying out a policy which his subordinates for the most part " regarded with the utmost aversion." But they worked with hitn "with as much loyalty as if they had approved of his policy." This deliberate aloofness from politics is closely associated with that silence under criticism to which the Prince of Wales referred. The per- manent servants of the Crown " hold their peace even when they know that if they spoke they would have much to say in their defence." But the defence of themselves would in the majority of cases mean more or less of cen- sure on their Parliamentary chiefs. The administrative mistakes that irritate public opinion are sometimes, of course, due to subordinates. Directions rightly given are wrongly carried out. But very often the fault resides in the directions themselves. The subordinates do what they are instructed to do, and the result is different from what the author of the directions expected. But it is the subordinate not the chief, the permanent not the Parlia- mentary official, that comes in for the blame. He may have thought the instructions given to him bad, he may have foreseen, and possibly have pointed out to the Minister, the certain consequence of the orders he was silence on his part, no matter how unjustly he may be censured. It is almost by accident that the Civil Service of this country has come to be what it is, but the accident has been a singularly happy one.
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