, 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.

We are sometimes told, now that good education is open to every one,
that men of every kind of social origin and class sympathy will enter to
an increasing extent the higher Civil Service. If that takes place it
will be an excellent thing, but meanwhile any one who follows the
development of the existing examination system knows that care is
required to guard against the danger that preference in marking may, if
only from official tradition, be given to subjects like Greek and Latin
composition, whose educational value is not higher than others, but
excellence in which is hardly ever acquired except by members of one
social class.

It would, of course, be ruinous to sacrifice intellectual efficiency to
the dogma of promotion from the ranks, and the statesmen of 1870 were
perhaps right in thinking that promotion from the second to the first
division of the service would be in their time so rare as to be
negligible. But things have changed since then. The competition for the
second division has become incomparably more severe, and there is no
reasonable test under which some of those second class officials who
have continued their education by means of reading and University
teaching in the evening would not show, at thirty years of a