relations, for instance, between the First Division minority and the Second Division majority of the clerks in each office vary, not on any considered principle, but according to the opinions and prejudices of some once-dominant but now forgotten chief.  The same is true of the relation between the heads of each section and the officials immediately below them.  In at least one office important papers are brought first to the chief.  His decision is at once given and is sent down the hierarchy for elaboration.  In other offices the younger men are given invaluable experience, and the elder men are prevented from getting into an official rut by a system which requires that all papers should be sent first to a junior, who sends them up to his senior accompanied not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute of his own suggesting official action.  One of these two types of organisation must in fact be better than the other, but no one has systematically compared them.

In the Colonial Office, again, it is the duty of the Librarian to see that the published books as well as the office records on any question are available for every official who has to report on it.  In the Board of Trade, which deals with subjects on which the importance of published as compared with official information is even greater, room has only just been found for a technical library which was collected many years ago.[94] The Foreign Office and the India Office have libraries, the Treasury and the Local Government Board have none.

[94] For a long time the Library of the Board of Trade was kept at the Foreign Office.

In the Exchequer and Audit Department a deliberate policy has been adopted of training junior officials by transferring them at regular intervals to different branches of the work.  The results are said to be excellent, but nothing of the kind is systematically done or has even been seriously discussed in any other Department which I know.

Nearly all departmental officials are concerned with the organisation of non-departmental work more directly executive than their own, and part of a wise system of official training would consist in ‘seconding’ young officials for experience in the kind of work which they are to organise.  The clerks of the Board of Agriculture should be sent at least once in their career to help in superintending the killing of infected swine and interviewing actual farmers, while an official in the Railway section of the Board of Trade should acquire some personal knowledge of the inside of a railway office.  This principle of ‘seconding’ might well be extended so as to cover (as is already done in the army) definite periods of study during which an official, on leave of absence with full pay, should acquire knowledge useful to his department; after which he should show the result of his work, not by the answering of examination questions, but by the presentation of a book or report of permanent value.