And now our Minister, seated at his official table, touches his pneumatic bell.  His Private Secretary appears with a pile of papers, and the day’s work begins.  That work, of course, differs enormously in amount, nature, importance, and interest with different offices.  To the outside world probably one office is much the same as another, but the difference in the esoteric view is wide indeed.  When the Revised Version of the New Testament came out, an accomplished gentleman who had once been Mr. Gladstone’s Private Secretary, and had been appointed by him to an important post in the permanent Civil Service, said:  “Mr. Gladstone, I have been looking at the Revised Version, and I think it distinctly inferior to the old one.”

“Indeed,” said Mr. Gladstone, with all his theological ardour roused at once:  “I am very much interested to hear you say so.  Pray give me an instance.”

“Well,” replied the Permanent Official, “look at the first verse of the second chapter of St. Luke.  That verse used to run, ’There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.’  Well, I always thought that a splendid idea—­a tax levied on the whole world by a single Act—­a grand stroke worthy of a great empire and an imperial treasury.  But in the Revised Version I find, ’There went out a decree that all the world should be enrolled’—­a mere counting! a census! the sort of thing the Local Government Board could do!  Will any one tell me that the new version is as good as the old one in this passage?”

This story aptly illustrates the sentiments with which the more powerful and more ancient departments regard those later births of time, the Board of Trade, the Local Government Board, the Board of Agriculture, and even the Scotch Office—­though this last is redeemed from utter contempt by the irritable patriotism of our Scottish fellow-citizens, and by the beautiful house in which it is lodged.  For a Minister who loves an arbitrary and single-handed authority the India Office is the most attractive of all.  The Secretary of State for India, is (except in financial matters, where he is controlled by his Council) a pure despot.  He has the Viceroy at the end of a telegraph-wire, and the Queen’s three hundred millions of Indian subjects under his thumb.  His salary is not voted by the House of Commons; very few M.P.’s care a rap about India; and he is practically free from Parliamentary control.  The Foreign Office, of course, is full of interest, and its social traditions have always been of the most dignified sort—­from the days when Mr. Ranville-Ranville used to frequent Mrs. Perkins’s Balls to the existing reign of Sir Thomas Sanderson and Mr. Eric Barrington.