IBA CIVIL SERVANT.
THE Civil Servant of tradition exists in our minds as a composite impression made up from Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollops, and the stock types of Punch and musical comedy—modified, perhaps, in individual cases by an acrid memory of the young man in spectacles who refused to allow us a rebate on our Income Tax. We figure him as a languid, well-paid and supercilious being with a drawl who hangs loose upon society without fulfilling any manifestly useful functions. That such a creature exists it would be unwise to deny ; but, like the typical John Bull, he is so rare an animal that we should be as much surprised to meet him as to meet the stage French- man or the cinema cowboy. Of course, in Government offices, as in other great collections of humanity, there are persons characterized otherwise than by their efficient dispatch of business. There is the gentleman so much engrossed by his private affairs that he has no time to earn his salary ; there is the official with a taste for publicity who bustles zealously from room to room and is always too busy to work ; there is the unashamed idler who does nothing and pretends to do nothing ; there is the solid plodding fellow who does everything
wrong ; there is the Admirable Crichton, capable of all things, who attempts them simultaneously with disastrous results ; there are sporting, reading, theatrical and convivial Civil Servants ; and, strange to say, there is a majority of steady, hard-working men who take a pride in doing their duty well.
By the irony of fate it is to this last class that the Service largely owes its unfortunate reputation for " red tape." The languid dilettante of popular legend obstructs nobody actively ; he is quite willing that your work should be done provided you do not ask him to do it. But the zealous official provides a much more formidable obstacle than mere inertia. No con- sideration will induce him to depart from the iron-clad code evolved by years of office practice. He knows how safe the ordinary course is, and how unsafe the unusual ; and he has no desire to risk his unspotted reputation by departing from the beaten track, however specious such a course may appear to be in a particular case. Ho has the faults of his virtues ; he has learned to love the Departmental routine for its own sake ; he has forgotten the God in the Machine and sacrifices you to the bureaucratic Moloch as willingly as ho has sacrificed himself. That he is what he is results from a radical defect in the system.
A man who has once passed the magic portals of the Civil Service Commissioners can look forward with certainty to a definite income, rising by £10 or £15 every year to a maximum of £400 or £500 per annum. Nominally this increase is subject to his obtaining certain certificates of efficiency ; but these in practice are withheld so rarely as to be negligible. Less than the stated scale he will not receive ; on the other hand, except by a freak of fortune, he is not likely to get much more. Early promotion is granted to but one in twenty of the deserving, so that the temptation held out to the junior officer is to work as little as he can and as carelessly as he dares : the annual increment comes alike to energetic Smith and comatose Brown ; and when good. work and bad are equally rewarded, it is idle to expect all the work to be good.. Class payment levels down- ward ; the slowest horse sets the pace for the squadron. If every entrant were given a living wage and subsequent increases were made to depend on his personal capacity, the nation would secure better service at a lower cost.
We hold, therefore, that rewards given indiscriminately to whole classes are bad, even when, as used to be the case, the donors have no direct interest in the gift. But as we pointed out recently, the war bonus awards are doubly bad as coming from persons who benefit by their own decision, and as depend- ing upon an Index Figure calculated by colleagues who are equally interested in having it assessed as high as possible. We do not for a moment allege that these officials are actuated by unworthy motives ; but we do contend that no servant of the State should be placed in a position where he is exposed to such influences.
There is another aspect of the ease which we cannot regard without regret. The concessions recently made, whatever arguments may be urged in their favour, wore granted not as a measure of justice, but of expediency and principally to prevent the possibility of a strike amongst the large body of junior officials. That this is so is evident from the consideration of one fact. If a Civil Servant on, say, £400 a year is fairly entitled to a War Bonus of £273 to maintain him in something approxi- mate to his pre-war position, an official who retired in 1914 on a pension of £400 per annum is entitled to a similar amount now.
• Yet he gets nothing, the reason obviously being that such pensioners are few in number and cannot go on strike. Existing Civil Servants have nearly all banded themselves into what are in effect Trade Unions, some of them largo in numbers and wielding considerable Parliamentary influence. That they should employ this strength to further their interests is inevitable, but that they should enforce their demands by hardly covert threats of a strike is, in our opinion, eminently improper. A Civil Servant by reason of his tenure enjoys certain advan- tages which other clerical workers do not possess. He is assured of holding his position so long as his conduct is good and he exhibits a tolerable degree of efficiency. The dismissal of a Civil Servant for incompetency is so rare an event that few of the oldest officials can recall a single example, while misconduct has to be flagrant before extreme measures are taken. He is sure also of a pension when his powers begin to fail ; and if ha dies in harness his heir or next-of-kin will receive a sum equal to a full year's salary of the deceased officer. In return for these advantages he is expected to be loyal to the Government% whatever party may be in power, and not to embarrass the responsible authorities by threats of " direct action." The public have been so long accustomed to the tacit acquiescence of both sides in this bargain that they have come to regard it as inviolable ; but resent events have gone far to undermine that confidence and to show how vain is the hope that Nationalization will do away with the fear of strikes.
In every office in the service there are now Whitley Councils ; and so far as these provide safety valves for blowing off steam which might be dangerous if confined, they discharge a moat useful function. When a number of men work together minor grievances are sure to arise which are not mitigated or removed solely because those in authority are not aware of their exist- ence; for such grievances the Whitley Councils furnish an admirable outlet. But when they are used as machinery for wholesale increases of salaries, we confess we look upon them with suspicion. They are supposed to conduce to more economical working of the Departmentsby bringing to a focus the united intelligence of the officials on all points of management. But we have not yet heard of any Departmental Council pro- ducing a scheme of organization which would result in cutting down the numbers of the staff employed. That there is room for drastic curtailment of this kind in many, if not all, of the offices is a matter of notoriety, yet the desire of the heads of Departments to augment their own importance by maintaining their staff at its maximum has hitherto co-operated with the natural unwillingness to " do a man out of his job," to counteract the most obvious dictates of economy. " I have been forty years in the service," said an old official, " and I never saw anything done away with yet." Under the new Reorganization Scheme Civil Servants enjoy vastly improved positions and prospects ; it is consequently incumbent upon them to reverse the evil tradition and by eliminating superfluities to make good the drain they have caused upon the public purse. Thus alone can they justify their own advancement.
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