Of course we have one supreme and devastating study of the illiterate minor official in Bumble.  That one figure lit up and still lights the whole problem of Poor Law administration for the English reading community.  It was a translation of well-meant regulations and pseudo-scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, arrogant, ill-bred flesh and blood.  It was worth a hundred Royal Commissions.  You may make your regulations as you please, said Dickens in effect; this is one sample of the stuff that will carry them out.  But Bumble stands almost alone.  Instead of realising that he is only one aspect of officialdom, we are all too apt to make him the type of all officials, and not an urban district council can get into a dispute about its electric light without being denounced as a Bumbledom by some whirling enemy or other.  The burthen upon Bumble’s shoulders is too heavy to be borne, and we want the contemporary novel to give us a score of other figures to put beside him, other aspects and reflections upon this great problem of officialism made flesh.  Bumble is a magnificent figure of the follies and cruelties of ignorance in office—­I would have every candidate for the post of workhouse master pass a severe examination upon “Oliver Twist”—­but it is not only caricature and satire I demand.  We must have not only the fullest treatment of the temptations, vanities, abuses, and absurdities of office, but all its dreams, its sense of constructive order, its consolations, its sense of service, and its nobler satisfactions.  You may say that is demanding more insight and power in our novels and novelists than we can possibly hope to find in them.  So much the worse for us.  I stick to my thesis that the complicated social organisation of to-day cannot get along without the amount of mutual understanding and mutual explanation such a range of characterisation in our novels implies.  The success of civilisation amounts ultimately to a success of sympathy and understanding.  If people cannot be brought to an interest in one another greater than they feel to-day, to curiosities and criticisms far keener, and co-operations far subtler, than we have now; if class cannot be brought to measure itself against, and interchange experience and sympathy with class, and temperament with temperament then we shall never struggle very far beyond the confused discomforts and uneasiness of to-day, and the changes and complications of human life will remain as they are now, very like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immense avalanche that is sliding down a hill.  And in this tremendous work of human reconciliation and elucidation, it seems to me it is the novel that must attempt most and achieve most.