How Sir Sydney Olivier, the Permanent Under Secretary for Agriculture,
came to be at the meeting and to attack a Cabinet Minister we are utterly at a loss to explain. If the precedent is to be followed, it will be an evil day for the Civil Service. The impertinence of publicly complaining in effect that the Cabinet starved his department in order to waste money on the Navy was colossal. We presume that Mr. Runciman will take some note of his subordinate's action. Apart from the scandal of a. Civil Servant attacking one of the colleagues of his chief, we are delighted that distinguished Liberals should at last be waking up seriously to the perils of our inflated expenditure, but we cannot imagine a. worse method of economy than the reduction of naval expenditure. We are certain—and we are glad to be able to say it—that this form of retrenchment will not commend itself to the country. Where a reduction is possible and urgently necessary is in the Bo-called schemes of social reform which only put sixpence into the workman's pocket for every shilling they take out of it.
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