The grim necessity of providing, after the events of the Boer War, for effective thought in the government of the British army produced the War Office Council.  The Secretary of State, instead of knowing only of those suggestions that reach him through the ‘bottle-neck’ of his senior official’s mind, now sits once a week at a table with half a dozen heads of sub-departments.  He hears real discussion; he learns to pick men for higher work; and saves many hours of circumlocutory writing.  At the same time, owing to a well-known fact in the physiology of the human brain, the men who are tired of thinking on paper find a new stimulus in the spoken word and the presence of their fellow human beings, just as politicians who are tired with talking, find, if their minds are still uninjured, a new stimulus in the silent use of a pen.

If this periodical alternation of written and oral discussion is useful in the War Office, it would probably be useful in other offices; but no one with sufficient authority to require an answer has ever asked if it is so.

One of the most important functions of a modern Government is the effective publication of information, but we have no Department of Publicity, though we have a Stationery Office; and it is, for instance, apparently a matter of accident whether any particular Department has or has not a Gazette and how and when that Gazette is published.  Nor is it any one’s business to discover and criticise and if necessary co-ordinate the statistical methods of the various official publications.

On all these points and many others a small Departmental Committee (somewhat on the lines of that Esher Committee which reorganised the War Office in 1904), consisting perhaps of an able manager of an Insurance Company, with an open-minded Civil Servant, and a business man with experience of commercial and departmental organisation abroad, might suggest such improvements as would without increase of expense double the existing intellectual output of our Government offices.

But such a Committee will not be appointed unless the ordinary members of parliament, and especially the members who advocate a wide extension of collective action, consider much more seriously than they do at present the organisation of collective thought.  How, for instance, are we to prevent or minimise the danger that a body of officials will develop ‘official’ habits of thought, and a sense of a corporate interest opposed to that of the majority of the people?  If a sufficient proportion of the ablest and best equipped young men of each generation are to be induced to come into the Government service they must be offered salaries which place them at once among the well-to-do classes.  How are we to prevent them siding consciously or unconsciously on all questions of administration with their economic equals?  If they do, the danger is not only that social reform will be delayed, but also that working men in England may acquire that hatred and distrust of highly educated permanent officials which one notices in any gathering of working men in America.