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.

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