imperative exigencies of the hour, and some by the zeal of wellmeaning faddists; screened by votes of credit from a minute investigation of their expenditure; staffed partly by patriotic volunteers, and in even larger proportion by well-rewarded amateurs, most of these war-time departments flourished awhile, and have been gradually dispersed. A few have survived. Of these the Ministry of Pensions, which in 1920-21 employed a staff of over 32,000 persons and expended more than £106,000,000, is the largest and the most indispensable; but if peace is happily preserved the work of this ministry will contract at an ever accelerating pace, and the ministry itself should, within a generation, be extinguished.

The same fate is hardly likely to befall another war legacy, the Ministry of Transport. During the war the great railways passed inevitably under the control of the Government, though the actual management was wisely entrusted to a committee of railway experts. After the war it was assumed, too hastily, that, for a variety of reasons, it was undesirable to hand back the railways to the individual companies which had owned and operated them. A vociferous demand arose in certain quarters that the opportunity should be seized to unify the existing railway systems and to nationalise the whole transport service. Mr. Churchill incautiously expressed himself in favour of nationalisation-and his utterance was taken, rightly or wrongly, to express the views of the Government of which he was an important member. The Conservative wing of the Coalition took alarm and the Government sought an easy compromise by setting up a new Ministry of Transport, under Sir Eric Geddes, and by passing the Railways Amalgamation Act of 1921. Semi-nationalisation, if it has disappointed the hopes of the optimists, has at least provided work for a new department of State, employing a staff of 464 persons. Such a result may well seem pitifully meagre to those who originally promoted the Ministry of Transport Bill in 1919, and who hoped to see the whole railway system of the country directed from Whitehall: but it represents, at any rate, an instalment of bureaucracy.

Parallel with the problems presented, at the conclusion of the war, by the transport industry were those presented by the coal mines. Mines and railways had alike been virtually nationalised during the war, and in both industries the employees had tasted the sweets of serving an employer who possessed a purse

temporarily bottomless. The end of the war and the resumption of normal budgeting, after a period of finance simplified by votes of credit, brought the State and the tax-payers, the mine-owners and the miners, face to face with hard economic facts. The public purse being, in reality, far from bottomless, how were the miners to be paid war-time wages without penalising the consumer and killing the industry?

The work thrown upon the Board of Trade by an attempt to solve these problems appeared to necessitate the creation, if not of a new ministry at least of a new department, semi-independently represented in Parliament by a Parliamentary Secretary designated 'The Secretary for Mines.' At the same time there was transferred to the Board of Trade and through it to the Secretary for Mines all the powers of a Secretary of State under enactments relating to mines and quarries. The Act which conferred a variety of powers upon the new department was obviously one of the many impossible compromises (dear to the hearts of Coalition Covernments) between the mutually exclusive principles of private enterprise, Socialism and Syndicalism. Consequently it enjoyed from the first little chance of success, and the new department has, naturally enough, failed to solve a problem which never will be solved by the intervention of bureaucracy.

The annals of the Civil Service, as already hinted, though crowded, are short. The "Service" may, indeed, be said to date only from the issue of a report by Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan (in 1853). As to the necessity of such a Service those eminent public servants had no doubt.

As matters now stand (they wrote) the Government of the country could not be carried on without the aid of an efficient body of permanent officers, occupying a position duly subordinate to that of the ministers who are directly responsible to the Crown and to Parliament, yet possessing sufficient independence, character, ability and experience to be able to advise, assist and to some extent influence those who are from time to time set over them.

Regularity of recruitment is one of the many beneficent changes which we owe to the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. Down to that time the principle of private patronage prevailed, and it is significant of the old system that in 1829 the Duke of Wellington wrote to his colleague (Peel) to complain not that the system was

*10 & 11 George V c. 50.

in any way objectionable or even scandalous, nor that its results reacted unfavourably upon the public service, but that the patronage had got into the hands of private members of Parliament who did not always vote with the Government. Twenty years later Sir Charles Trevelyan condemned the service as overstaffed, lazy and incompetent-a secure asylum for" the dregs of all other professions."

Meanwhile, Lord Macaulay had in 1833 tentatively introduced the principle of competition by examination, for the recruitment of the service of John Company. Temporarily abandoned after a brief trial, the system of open competition was finally and permanently adopted for the Indian Service in 1853.

The English Civil Service reached the same goal by much more gradual stages. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1853 recommended that the system of patronage should be abandoned in favour of open competition. Two years later the Civil Service Commission was set up, and thereafter the system of patronage was gradually superseded by that of open competition; functions within the departments were carefully differentiated; superannuation was enforced and pensions were made universal. It is gratifying to know that, after a lapse of more than half a century, the Royal Commission of 1914, presided over by Lord Macdonnell, was able to report that "the fundamental principles upon which the Service is based are sound, and that the reforms, steadily applied to it, had resulted in the creation of a competent, zealous and upright body of officers." The Macdonnell Report recommended however that in order to secure for the service of the State the best available brains in whatever rank of society they might emerge, the several examinations for Civil Service appointments of different grades should be brought into closer and more logical correspondence with the educational system of the country. The new grading within the Service, introduced since 1920 in accordance with the recommendations of the Civil Service National Whitley Council, has already, it is confidently believed, gone a long way, in conjunction with other changes, towards carrying into effect the intentions of the Macdonnell Commission.

More or less parallel with the reforms in the system of recruitment for the Civil Service has been the increased control exercised by Parliament over the permanent executive. So long as the king actually ruled it was natural that the administrative

officials of the realm should be regarded as his personal servants, appointed to do his will and remunerated in part out of his purse and, in larger part, out of the fees of suitors and clients. When power passed to Parliament the servants of the king naturally became the servants of the State. Not however until 1848 were any estimates for the salaries of the State servants presented to Parliament. Down to the end of the eighteenth century the cost of the civil government (so far as it was not self-supporting) was paid out of the civil list of the sovereign, but in the year 1802 there appeared in the public accounts a new item," Miscellaneous Civil Services out of Supplies." The total sum thus voted amounted only to £729,855, as compared with nearly £1,000,000 for the Civil List, but nevertheless the item marked the beginning of parliamentary control over the Civil Service. By 1832 the payments out of supply had mounted to £2,850,000, and by 1847 to £3,264,000.

This growth of expenditure led in 1848 to the appointment of a Select Committee to enquire into the possibility of reductions and of improvements in the mode of submitting estimates to Parliament. During the next twenty years however, civil expenditure increased slowly, though in the main steadily, until in 1868 it reached a sum of over £16,000,000. That it was not larger was due in no small measure to the persistent efforts of Mr. Gladstone to keep down expenditure. The figures of the following twenty years moved slightly up and down, but even as late as 1890-91 the Civil Service vote was only just over £16,000,000. From that date it moved rapidly upwards. Mr. Lloyd George's first budget provided £40,070,000 for Civil Service expenditure, and in five years under the same personality the figure rose to over £61,000,000. The estimate for 1925-26, after deducting war pensions, etc., is roughly £152,000,000. These figures point more graphically than words can do to the rapid expansion during the last forty years of the activities of the Civil Service.

The foregoing summary, rough and rapid as it has necessarily been, raises many questions of high significance, both administrative and financial-some of them gravely disquieting. Does the existing arrangement of business make for efficiency and economy? Has not the multiplication of departments tended to the overlapping of duties and the reduplication of functions? Is the articulation of work, as between the several offices, orderly

and scientific? Or is it haphazard-the result of piecemeal legislation and uncoordinated administration? That there has been some improvement in recent years, in the distribution of work, is undeniable. For example, the reconstituted Education Office represents some concentration of functions. But it is even now far from complete: the Home Office is still responsible for industrial schools; the Treasury administers directly the grants to universities; the Ministry of Agriculture also has close relations with universities and colleges. There may be conclusive reasons for this distribution of educational work, but why should the Board of Education be responsible for the Victoria and Albert Museum, for the Royal College of Art, the Bethnal Green Museum and the Science Museum, but not for the Natural History Museum at South Kensington ?

A question of fundamental importance seems at this point to emerge should the articulation of functions be according to the persons and classes to be dealt with, or according to the services to be performed? Lord Haldane's Committee on the Machinery of Government (Cd. 9230), while observing that neither principle could be applied with absolute and exclusive rigidity, pronounced unequivocally in favour of differentiation according to services. Nor can it be doubted that in this matter they were right. The Committee also favoured a drastic change in the relation of the Cabinet and the departments, generally in the direction of the experiment initiated by Mr. Lloyd George when, in 1916, he set up a small "War Cabinet " in place of the " Sanhedrim." The Cabinet would under this system become purely directorial, while the majority of the ministers would be departmental chiefs, outside the Cabinet, each responsible for his own department, but with no collective responsibility. Collective responsibility would still adhere presumably to the small " Directory," who would determine the policy to be submitted to Parliament, would co-ordinate and delimit the activities of the administrative departments and would exercise a continuous though general control over them. For such a change there may be something to be said, but it would evidently involve an approximation to a presidential executive, though at the same time preserving that close contact between executive and legislature which is the essence not of presidential but of parliamentary democracy.

This article is, however, more concerned with the relations