Minister told the truth "about his own participation in the gradual shaping of policy on such vital questions during his term of office, he would tell us that he hardly remembered any Cabinet decision being formally taken on general policy, unless legislation of a controversial kind had been introduced into Parliament, unless some dramatic decision had to be taken, or unless the administration of a particular Department had offended some powerful outside interests or had become a public scandal." 1 The 450 civil servants in the Administrative Class of the British Civil Service upon whom falls the work of gathering information, composing Ministerial speeches, advising the Ministers, drafting legislation, have their knowledge, in the main, second-hand. They have obtained their conception of society and its processes through books and lectures to the time of their examination; and from entry into the service have watched a minute part of the universe at work through the medium of their office. This is supplemented by the stirring events of deputations, the findings of Parliamentary and Departmental Committees and Royal Commissions. That knowledge is remote from reality. It is second-hand. Little that such a method of approach to reality can give may serve as an impulse to creative effort. If it is too much to say with Mr. and Mrs. Webb 2 that these men desire "the amenity of a quiet life," and that "the special skill in a civil servant which is most appreciated by his Parliamentary Chief and by his colleagues in the Civil Service is not initiative or statesmanship, and not even the capacity to plan and to

1 Webb, Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, p. 67.

2 Ibid. p. 68; and see Viscount Haldane's remark in the preface to The Development of the Civil Service: "Now these methods of destroying the chances of the Civil Service (having no policy or having more than one) have disclosed themselves constantly in the past and they disclose their existence to-day. They are the outcome of a defect in the public habit of mind, one that is common in British parliaments and in British Ministers who derive from these their authority. That habit is to proceed to immediate action without systematically spending time on prior reflection. The tendency leads to inevitable confusion and waste. But it is in harmony with a parliamentary tradition which has always laid the main stress on gifts of a parliamentary and platform order."

explain the departmental projects, but either to avoid questions in the House, or, if these are asked, to furnish answers which allay without satisfying the curiosity of the inquirers,"-if that is too keen a criticism on these men, it is not unjust to say that their work can only be better when their perception of the social process ceases to be, as it is now, second-hand and based on hearsay evidence. And the higher tasks of creative effort come, through the process of promotion by seniority, to the elderly men, past middle age; men who neither by nature. nor by the necessities of their situation are impelled to take the risks and flights of imagination necessary to the invention of new devices. It is their business to clothe Blue Books and letters with reality, but outside life cannot directly compel and invigorate them. For them, as for all others, the quickening juices of life are to be found in life itself, and this, so far, they are without.

Our best sources of inspiration in legislation and administration lie, then, not in the representative assembly itself, nor, in the bodies, Cabinet and Civil Service, which have gradually gained almost complete control over the initiatory process. Nor in their sporadic, transient Royal Commissions and Parliamentary and Departmental Committees do they find seemingly better instruments of mental stimulation. For these wait upon a public crisis or an exceptionally thoughtful statesman's idea to be brought into life. They are often biassed by the selection of members before their birth. They have a procedure of formal questions (to experts separately) and answers, constituting no real basis for productive thought; the experts do not question each other, sometimes they know nothing of the previous evidence. They have no power to press for the parliamentary discussions of the proposals made and arguments

1 Cf. Milner, Journal of the Institute of Public Administration, April 1923, p. 85

et seq.

2 Cf. Report of Select Committee (House of Commons Procedure), No. 378 of 1915, pp. 59 and 163, where witnesses admit ignorance of previous evidence.

advanced.1 They are not conspectual, in the sense that all interested parties share in making the decisions arrived at. It is a "second-hand " system; and Lord Randolph Churchill's Blue Book Adventure 2 and Lord Robert Cecil's reproach in the manner of Job are its marks.3

A few words may be said about the party organisation in its relation to the problem of bringing to the task of government a satisfactory understanding of national problems. Quite clearly most of the fruitful minds in the country are left out of the national service because they are not of the temperament (Mr. Wells's kinetic type)a to fight and win elections, or cannot afford the expenses which an election inevitably entails. It would be easy to compile a formidable list of men who could be of great service to the general political work of the State, but who for the above-mentioned reasons are excluded from a public forum which still commands some attention. The party organisation wants "safe" men who can win seats, or lose them with compensating éclat.

The party is inextricably bound up with the territorial constituency. It is on the one side the band

1 Cf. Representative Government, J. S. Mill, in relation to the Select Committees of the House of Commons: the opinions or private crotchets which have been overruled by knowledge always insist on giving themselves a second chance before the tribunal of ignorance."

In

2 Lord Randolph Churchill, by Winston Spencer Churchill, vol. i. p. 387. In relation to Anglo-Russian relations in 1885, the Government's Eastern policy and a vote of credit of £11,000,000: "The vote of credit came on at once. The speech which he then delivered was a speech of minute detail, but of accurate detail. twenty-four hours he had mastered an enormous Blue Book. No one could contradict him at any point." Many members have not the energy, few the time, but a handful the imagination, to constructively criticise the action of Government and the making of policy by this method. A more direct relation between the forces of society described in Blue Books and the makers of policy is necessary.

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3 Cf. Hansard, Jan. 30, 1913, col. 1553, Lord Robert Cecil on the Resolution for Allocation of Time on the Established Church (Wales) Bill. 'We all know how a Bill is discussed under the guillotine. We know how grotesque were some of the answers given by ministers on this Bill. They had not taken the trouble to understand the brief furnished by the permanent officials. They read it out, and very often they read it out wrong. I do not blame them. They are human beings. They know it is quite unimportant what they say under the guillotine. They know that nobody can hurt them, and that when the bell rings they will have their cohorts brought in from outside to vote as they are told."

4 Cf. Modern Utopia, p. 256 et seq.

which unites the otherwise politically atomised electors; on the other, the instrument through which the latter exercise their political power.1 But the method of exercising that political power through the party is curious, perhaps amazing. It is their claim that they represent the electors. To an unsophisticated person this claim would be taken to mean that the representative knows the citizens' interests and undertakes to promote them in Parliament. But, it may be objected, perhaps many citizens themselves do not know their interests. For what does that knowledge of interests imply? 2 Surely this, that each citizen has a multitude of relationships, from the more personal duties which rarely come so overtly into contact with other people that they can become the subject of outside organisation and control, then through his family ties, his interests relating to his occupation, and other social institutions, to the whole State, his neighbours, and foreign countries. This knowledge of his interests, or what he would like done in regard to these various relationships, gets more and more dim and confused as he moves towards knowledge of phenomena dependent upon the publicity-instruments of Press, platform and cinema. Of his interests in relation. to these things he knows little, because he knows next to nothing about the phenomena themselves. The representative would not, it appears, admit the possession of such ignorance. He adopts the attitude of a benevolent autocrat and provides the citizen who cares to listen to him. or his agents, or to bend the knee before the rubric of his party without listening to him, with a set of conceptions, more or less vague, of his interests, that is, the desirable relationship between himself and other entities—a set of conceptions either invented by the candidate (rarely), or borrowed from the Press, or bestowed upon him by his party. The party conception is, for the citizen, more

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1 Cf. my article on Cabinet and Party, 1914-1921," in Economica, January 1922. 2 Cf. importantly Walter Lippman's analysis in Public Opinion.

C

worth adherence than either of the other two, because it is in the course of time tested by the opposition of other parties and tested by the Press. The necessity of future recourse to the electorate and the local party executives in the constituencies, the need for maintaining a continuum of prestige, compel the party to maintain, by means of research committees,1 conferences and publication departments, a certain reputation for understanding, expressing, and being active in realising, the needs of

the nation.

The system has in many respects served the country well from 1832, when the Registration Societies became the basis of the modern caucuses,2 but the electoral process, well enough analysed by Ostrogorski and Graham Wallas, falsified even the rather clumsy representative power they could claim; and their tendencies towards oligarchical control3 gradually robbed them of a basis of confidence necessary for real civic contentment with their action. But worse still is the fact that as soon as positive problems of social transformation arose for settlement in the first two decades of the twentieth century, as soon as the fundamental questions relating to private property, income, religion, education and relations between employer and employed were touched in Parliament, the defects of the electoral process, the oligarchical nature of the party, the faults of procedure

1 E.g. Labour Research Department, which formerly had this character, and other Advisory Committees of the Labour Party, Beer, History of British Socialism, vol. ii. p. 290 et seq. Cf. Daily News, February 21, 1923. "London Liberal candidates who stood at the last General Election conferred at the National Liberal Club on Monday night with the committee of the London Liberal Federation on questions of industrial policy, especially with reference to unemployment, retiring pensions and the necessity of securing for the workers a more adequate share in the fruits of industry. After animated discussion Mr. John H. Harris moved a resolution urging the leaders of the Liberal Party to set up without delay a Research Committee with a view to the formulation of a forward policy on social, industrial and economic problems. The resolution was carried unanimously, and with acclamation."

Is this "Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant" ?

2 Cf. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties, vol. i. p. 140 et seq., and Parker, Sir Robert Peel, vol. ii. p. 368.

3 Cf. Michel, Les Partis politiques, especially Parts 1, 2, 3 and 6.

4 A rather subjective treatment is that by Belloc and Chesterton, The Party System.