THE CIVIL SERVICE IN TIME OF WAR.
Tn-m importance of an efficient Civil Service in time of war is felt throughout the whole Army and Navy. The way in which the work at the War Office and Admiralty is done affects the war much more than is thought by those who see the movements, and never think of the machinery for moving the wires. " Victories abroad must be organized at home" ; and this holds good not alone as regards the mind of the Minister who constructs a scheme of war policy or dictates a campaign; but as regards the officials charged simply with the administration of work dictated by other. minds. These officials themselves and their rules and habits of work—in other words, what we call " the system "—may alter the execution of the work so as to practically frustrate many a fine scheme ; and the resolutions of earnest, far-seeing men are " sioklied o'er" by retarding or imperfect action. If the delays resulting from a bad administration were in any way caused by consideration one might hope that time would mature thought; but the work to be done comes into the hands of the Civil Service —the administrative agency—only when the Ministers have re- solved on its execution. Every delay at this period is a cause of cost and a risk of periL It will be naturally said by the apolo-. gists of the Civil Service that it is unreasonable to expect that offices organized for state work during peace should execute the different and increased work of the war ; the office is arranged in its • numbers, manner of work, ;gradations' hours of labour, and pro- motion, entirely with reference to certain work and certain hours of work, and it cannot do the new and hard work without awk- wardness in setting about it and imperfection in the result. The apology has a great deal of force in it. Our Government offices are organized for the ordinary Civil Service ; men show skill, zeal, and tact in relation to an amount and kind of work different from that demanded during war, and the man who may be an excellent clerk during the quiet time of peace may very naturally not feel equal to the new demand on his capacity. This is a practical difficulty which again and again arises in all our offices at the outbreak of a war. A man, for instance, who keeps a certain set of books, and who does his work with admirable precision, finds that, according to his notions of work, he must take two days to dispose of the sec- tion of business which he formerly could, on account of its lesser amount, dispose of in a day. He therefore takes the two days, and does it very well. The public business, however, cannot wait ; he is summoned before the chief, and urged to speed. He shows that he cannot execute, in his usual six hours, the double amount of work that comes in, and he must therefore leave• over half till the next day. " But the work must be done in one day ; you must work beyond four o'clock." It is easy to give such an order, but to whom is the order given ; to a man who has done his allotted work well for twenty years, who is now a middle- aged man of settled habits, who has lost that buoyancy of youth that could face any work, who is stepping steadily up the ladder of promotion to his five or seven hundred a year, and who has• really in his way been a very valuable servant. Many such men simply decline to obey ; their health would not stand it, (in fact, they would miss too sorely their family dinner at five at Camber- well or Brixton,) and they manage to make some plausible ex- cuse; or if they yield before a stern chief, they can manage to obey to the letter and leave the spirit unfulfilled. What are you to do with such men ? Are you to dismiss them ? If you so cle- cide, prepare also to dismiss, at the outset of every war, some of the safest, best men in your offices. But you have scarcely any other remedy. In some Offices, a kind of patchwork remedy is adopted, not altogether successful; the work left unfinished by the permanent official is finished, after four, by a temporary as- sistant; thus two men have the charge of one set of books,—a practice tending to confuse responsibility and to cause irregu- larity. That there is no other remedy save dismissal is, we think, the great defect of the Civil Service at the present day. This is not the only way in which the Civil Service betrays its want of adaptability to the execution of new work. Other causes beside war affect offices from time to time ; new legislation may extend the powers of a department or considerably alter the character of its duties. The old staff have to face a new set of duties. If there be two or three energetic chiefs with a fair proportion of young subordinates the change may be suc- cessfully carried through, but if as often happens the chiefs are past hard work and the subordinates are in the main middle-aged, men of lethargic temperament, the difficulties are considerable. The vis inertue of the old official comes out in a powerful resist- ance ; men who by previous work and good service have earned a character find themselves fearless in the strength of their position. They stand on the old ways in fact, if not avowedly, and a younger set of men have to be brought in to carry out the task. But the stubborn seniors possess the very situations—the special posts —that ought to be filled by the executors of the new work; what are you to do with them ? Prescription secures them against dis- missal, and as a general rule they are retained, while newer men, added at the public cost to the staff of the office, do nearly all the work. It will be naturally asked why not remove the old officials to other offices, but this course presents serious difficulties. Un- happily the Civil Service though here and elsewhere spoken of under this generic name is in reality nothing but a number of de- partments. Each office is arranged independently. The pay, ranks, promotions, and management of each is arranged without reference to the rest of the service. A clerkship in the Foreign Office is very different from a clerkship in the Customs ; the War Office system is distinct from that of the India Office ; the Colo- nial Office and the Home Office have little in common. This does not arise as some will suppose from the differences in the work done by each—for the man who writes a good letter at the Cus- toms requires as much ability as he who pens a good letter in Downing Street, and the précis writer in Leadenhall Street does much the same kind of work as the official charged with the same work in Pall Mall. The differences arose in the old time when each office was really distinct in authority and in government, when each Secretary of State was an individual minister of the King, taking the Sovereign's orders and not involved through the later invention of the Cabinet Council in responsibility for the administration of any other department. But all that is now changed. The whole work of the Administration is really subordinate to the First Lord of the Treasury—in his double ca- pacity of First Minister of the Crown, and chief Lord of the pub- lic purse—and no Secretary of State can obtain money without the sanction of the Tre . The old isolations of the perma- nent staff are however satIlulriept up. Departments act as if they knew nothing of one another; and the old diversified organization helps the isolation. When cases occur such as those we have mentioned—where a middle-aged official finds himself unfit for any change of work in his office—there are almost insuperable diffi- culties in:carrying out the very natural idea that he should be re- moved to another department where he could find fitting employ- ment. His original appointment was to that department; in that he has graduated to a certain position holding a certain salary, entitled to a certain increase, expecting a certain promotion. You might look through all the other offices and not find a berth like his in any of them. If he has 3001. rising by 101. to 5001., and stopping there, you find in the next office 2001. rising by 16/. or 201. a year to 4001., there stopping, but with the after chance of a step to 6001. One should have to call in an actuary to ascertain the relative values, so that the exchange might be equitable or the transfer fair. Then unless a man leaves the new office to make room for the transferred individual, all the men below him in the new office are wronged., their course of promotion is unexpectedly checked, and an injurious discontent arises. In such cases as we have pointed out of the non-adaptability of an individual, the course now often adopted is to superannuate the non-competent clerk—often when he has twenty years' work in him, and could do the ordinary work of any of our offices with credit and zeal. We have known eases where a man of forty—a strong, healthy, clever man—was superannuated from a Secretaryship be- cause he could not agree with the Commissioner, and the department is burdened to this day, and in all likelihood will for the next twenty or thirty years with a pension of nearly 4001. a year to a man more capable of good work than three fourths of the men in the service. While the Treasury were with one hand sanctioning, in the routine way which too much work often compels, this flagrant pension, they were giving equally routine sanction to the appointment of new clerks and secretaries in other departments. But the departments are distinct, and though their communications meet perchance in the same Treasury letter-basket, and are both paid out of John Bull's big purse, they know nothing of one another. It sometimes happens that one department will be dismissing a score of tempo- rary clerks who have gone through ten years training, while an- other department is forced to drill twenty raw lade into efficient clerkship—the wants of one office and the superfluities of another are not made mutually known. But the main evil of this isolation of departments does not so much lie in its prevention ofremovals from one department to another of practised clerks—such removals are not very often advisable, for experience in a department is an im- mense merit which the cleverness of the best new man might not counterbalance. The evil simply lies in the rigid system and stupid departmental isolation which confines each office within itself and prevents its award of punishments or rewards save within the framework of the establishment itself. Sometimes in the higher ranks of the Service a Minister interferes with excellent intention to cause a transfer. He finds that the bookkeeper, or accountant, or Secretary of a particular department has shown great ability and great zeal in his office—but the salary of the post—quite enough for an ordinary tenant—is really insufficient for the merits of the present official. What is done ? To reward him properly the man is taken from the office where he has done his best work, where he has shown his greatest ability, and where he is and will be most useful, and is made secretary of an entirely new office, not that he is fit for the new work but because its salary is fit for his merits. This is a coutse adopted over andever again and with great injury to the service—injury to the first office, possible injury to the new office, and decided injustice to its officials. It is as our readers will see quite the opposite error to that which keeps the wrong man in the place that another man might better fill, but both arise from the same cause—that stiffness of system which will not allow the service to adaptiteelf to occasions of new work or to the presence of new men—which does not know how to remove unfit men without dismissal or to reward fit men without removal. The salaries and rewards are all fixed like zoophytes in certain situations. If Jones, a junior clerk, shows remarkable ability in a crisis and charms the Commissioners they give him the place of poor Smith the senior clerk, who has done his duty without the least fault but who has not the shining ability of Jones. This is promotion by merit no doubt, but why should Jones's merit outweigh Smith's fitness—or why not reward Jones without doing an injustice to a man because he has not those " talents " for which we are to make a carrier° ouverte. It is a lesser injustice but we may also ask why Jones illustrious in abilities should, deposing Smith, jump over the heads of humble Brown and hu bier Robinson who have been working steadily, but who have the talent of Jones ? Why should they be put down and heartned that one man's zeal may be rewarded ? Another po that in giving Smith's post with its salary of 5001. a y Jones who had only 2001. a year, you may give him a v ward appropriate enough for his special abilities and nary zeal, but you may be giving special a post and a F
entirely unsuited to him. Here again the rigidity mental isolation of the service is in fault ; the.chic means of rewarding a man save by placing him in and to reward him they must disregard the pressnt
the post, its peculiar duties, and the claims of the men passed ov. in the promotion for merit. And not alone as restricting thy power of heads of offices is this rigidity and isolation injurious. A clerk often finds himself unfavourably situated in an office; his chief and he are at personal enmity ; he could work better under another master, but he has nomeans of obtaining a transfer to departments where he co7lir tad a more congenial chief. He must stay where he is or resign. The same sentence was, we remember, most harshly launched at a clerk who some years ago being threatened with chest disease, (the seed of the ill- ness sown while travelling in the public service,) applied for leave to effect an exchange with any Civil Servant in Australia ; per- mission was refused and he died at his post,—as cruel a result of departmental isolation as any we can remember.
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