OUR CIVIL SERVANTS

I HAVE taken on myself, in the despotic character of chairman, to put this toast (The Civil Service) before all the other services of the Queen. Sir Evelyn Wood rightly cheers, because this, to use the language of the last year of the nineteenth century, is the "show" of the Civil Service. The usual course of your chairman is to enter upon a long but a justified panegyric of all that the Civil Service does for the country. I do not propose to take that course, and I am glad to see that with the modesty inherent in the Civil Service that announcement is cheered. I do not do so for two reasons. In the first place, last autumn I had an opportunity of saying in Edinburgh what I thought of the Civil Service when there were no Civil

servants there to blush. Now I should not care to see the whole audience turn crimson at hearing what I thought of them.

Another reason which debars me from praising you too much is that between me and the Civil Service there is a great gulf fixed. There is, of course, the obvious gulf which you think I meant that you are in office, and that I am not. That is not what

I mean, and I find it extremely necessary in these days to explain very clearly and explicitly what I do mean. The gulf that I speak of is this: that in our public offices there are two classes of officials. One is the political head, who, in the language of Lord Beaconsfield, may be described as a transient and embarrassed phantom who flits across the scene; and the other is a permanent official, who remains, and will remain while many Ministers cross his path. Sedet aeternumque sedebit. Well, as I belong to the first class, it is no use my pretending to praise the second too much. I think it better to keep up the description I have laid down, and speak as a more or less disinterested observer.

But there is another difference between us. You know, I suppose, that ever since the time of Daniel, and I believe even as far back as the time of Pharaoh-I think my language recalls to you the worst moments of the examination that got you into the service—ever since the time of Daniel, and even back to the time of Pharaoh, there has been a broad distinction between those who make speeches and who dream dreams, and those who interpret them. I belong to the ingenuous class that makes speeches; you belong to the ingenious class that interprets them. And though I do not habitually dream dreams, I will venture to tell you a dream of mine, which you may interpret as you will. When say that I make speeches, you may be well aware that I tell the truth; but when I say that you interpret them, you may think I am trading on your credulity. As a matter of fact I have hallucinations on the Civil Service, and one of them is this-that every morning the first object of a conscientious civil servant is to see the utterances of his political chief, to interpret them as best he can, and to trans

I

will.

mute them as well as he can into the work and the policy of his office.

Let me take a concrete example. On my right I see Sir Thomas Sanderson, with whom I have been more than once officially connected at the Foreign Office. I should be shocked if Sir Thomas Sanderson were to deny that when I was in office-I do not venture to speak of other Secretaries of State-the first thing he did in the morning, after opening the most urgent box of telegrams, was to set himself to read any speech that I might have made on the previous day--whether at a distribution of prizes to an athletic club, or at the opening of a library, and then to read into it what he had found in it, and secondly what he did not find in it, and, lastly, with an ultimate squeeze, what he could possibly derive from it by the unaided light of a boiling imagination; and I should be more annoyed if Sir Thomas Sanderson, refreshed by that intercourse with my intellect, did not proceed at once to apply to the foreign policy of the country the light he had derived from that almost inspired utterance. That is why

I

say that between the Civil Service and myself there is a great gulf fixed. But, after all, we all of us have our uses, and even a political phantom, who has ceased to be transient, and in that shape has ceased to haunt the public offices, may have an opinion founded upon what he has seen while he was in their midst.

I am not going to utter eulogies on the Civil Service, for the reasons I have stated, but I have occasionally been afflicted with dreams as to what would happen in certain conceivable circumstances, which may illustrate better than anything I can say what I think of the Civil Service.

Suppose that, as has happened in the other services of the Crown, there was to be a mutiny or a strike in the Civil Service. There was once a mutiny at the Nore. In the last century, Highland regiments, or at least one of them raised in the Highlands, declared that they would return to the Highlands. Suppose there was to be a strike of the Civil Service—the usual thing: an inadequate share of the profits, hours too long, the rules of the trade union transgressed-what