considered, even were they considered with the most respect→ ful attention; nay, were all manner of kind, and flattering, and soothing expressions lavished on the Scottish people. They are themselves no dealers in exaggerated phrases, and will never consent to receive them in lieu of redress. It is a currency which they will not use in paying, and will not take in payment. They differ herein from other portions of the United Kingdom, where great store is set by talk, much feeling is professed, and much suffered to evaporate in big and loud words. All who have to deal with these different natures would do well to mark this diversity, and so avoid disappointment when the remedy that is found to cure discontent in the one country, proves in the other wholly inoperative, if it does not augment the feeling it was intended to allay.

ART. IX.-SYMONDS ON ORGANISATION OF CIVIL

SERVICE.

Papers relative to the Obstruction of Public Business and the Organisation of the Civil Service. By ARTHUR SYMONDS,

Esq. (Printed for Private Circulation.)

ALL who are in the habit of watching the course of public business must have been struck with the comparatively slow progress which is made in the reform of abuses and the introduction of improvements in matters unconnected with party politics, and upon which there is but little diversity of opinion among thinking men.

The tenacity of life evinced by the most palpable and pernicious abuses in this country is amazing. Witness the Law, with its "thrice battered" Court of Chancery, which so long withstood the assaults of public indignation, its Ecclesiastical Courts, and other departments, too numerous to name. In the Criminal Law the retention of the ancient system of entrusting the prosecution of offenders to the indolence, caprice, or corruption of private prosecutors, the almost total absence of any means of stopping crime at its source, by the

arrest and reformation of criminal children, are instances familiar to every one. In the sanatory state of the country, too, progress has commenced but recently, and now the advance is slow compared with the need. Witness the rapid increase of the coal smoke nuisance, the hideous defilement of our rivers by the outfall into them of sewage, the vast urban neighbourhoods which are growing up without any provision for the exercise and healthful recreation of the population, and the slender care which is taken of the other conditions of health.

It might be à priori supposed that in these days of enlightened public discussion, of earnest desire for the improvement and welfare of the people, and of almost omnipotent public opinion, every Ministry would be only too happy to buy credit and popularity by its forwardness in promoting the remedy of these evils, by which it would not encounter the obstacles of party opposition, but would win for itself the approbation of all classes of politicians. Yet we see session after session pass by, leaving most of these abuses in full vigour.

This enigma, which must have puzzled most thinking men, finds its solution in Mr. Symonds's book, which is the fruits of an experience extending over about twenty-five years of various departments of the public service, including an official post in one of the colonies.

It is not, Mr. Symonds shows, to any lukewarmness on the part of the powers that be, either of Parliament, of Government, or of the public offices, that the want of progress is to be attributed, nor is it in the main due to a want of sufficient numerical strength, but to an absence of good organisation, to a want of such a marshalling and arrangement of the public service as to make it a potent machine for the despatch of business.

The principle of division of labour, that great multiplier of force, is not sufficiently developed, or is developed in a wrong direction.

The public service is divided, as is well known, into departments. These departments have not generally a full

tions perfectly compatible with each other and suited to his disposition and abilities. This arises sometimes from departments having too small a range of duties, so that there is not sufficient work to employ a full complement of officers. The remedy here seems to be to consolidate such departments with others having similar duties. As Mr. Symonds remarks: "No small war, no small office." In some cases the duties of a department are of a very dissimilar character; the consequence of which is that the officers have incompatible functions,-functions for the due performance of which different orders of mind are necessary. The remedy here is to separate such functions. The public work should be so distributed among the departments that each should have a sufficiency of business of a character not much diversified to employ a full complement of officers.

The great advantage of this arrangement in promoting individual responsibility is obvious. If every officer had a definite department of work to perform, of a comparatively simple and homogeneous character, it would be easy to hold him responsible for the due performance of it.

Another great disadvantage of the present system, which Mr. Symonds points out, is, that a large portion of our most important public work is not executed by regularly trained officers at all, but by commissions appointed for the nonce. We need hardly instance the Law and Equity Commission, the Criminal Law Commission, the Commission for the Consolidation of the Statute Law, and a host of others. In these cases a number of persons supposed to be acquainted with the subject to be inquired into are selected and appointed commissioners; they then appoint a secretary and clerk, and the work proceeds. These functionaries being untrained to act together, and not being accustomed to systematic investigation, usually make but unsatisfactory progress in the inquiry intrusted to them. The report when made is generally that of some active individual, but little modified by his brother inquirers.

If there were an organised standing inquiry department, with a full complement of officers and machinery, and a regular system of action, such inquiries might be entrusted

to it, with a certainty of the investigation being vigorously proceeded with and ably concluded.

But it is time to make the reader acquainted with the book under review.

We should premise that this work is not of a finished character. This the author fairly owns in his prefatory remarks:

"The papers in fact were not originally written for publication. They are principally a handful of notes which one man of business has written to another to assist in an object of very varied application and much detail. They have no literary pretension. The writer, having been a witness (under circumstances favourable for observation) of the difficulties incident to the transaction of public affairs by the Officers of State, and having bestowed some thought and experience on the means of overcoming those difficulties, has felt it to be his duty to contribute his quota of suggestion to efforts in that direction. To have presented the matter in a more ambitious and more readable form would have involved the loss of opportunities that the present time affords."

The author, it is to be hoped, will at his leisure put forth his work in a more perfected form. An illustration thrown in here and there would enliven the book, and would impress the matter more strongly on the reader's memory.

The author proceeds to re-print a number of letters which he published in the "Spectator" in the year 1848. There he sets forth the evils above alluded to, and briefly enumerates the remedies he proposes, which remedies are elaborately and systematically described in the new portion of the present work.

He proposes that Parliament itself should set the example of self-organisation, by dividing itself into a number of standing Committees, each of which should take a department, such as England, Ireland, Foreign Affairs, Expenditure, Revenue, Trade, Law, &c.; these should again divide themselves into Sub-committees to consider matters of detail. Mr. Symonds shows that this would enable Parliament to get through a large amount of business with comparative ease, and that matters of each kind being conducted by persons who would acquire a sort of special skill therein, the

"principles on which they should be conducted would soon be determined, and assume the vulgar but valuable position of common-place." We should then cease to be wearied and disgusted with the constant discussion of first principles, or, rather, of the assumption of positions involving a contradiction of them. A further advantage of such organisation would be, that as every member of Parliament would have a regular department of work to occupy him if he pleased, a "larger number would share in useful labours, and thus be induced to forbear from seeking distinction in much speaking." The desirability of such forbearance needs no comment.1

In these letters Mr. Symonds enters in a general manner into the importance of systematic machinery to the effecting of improvements. The following remark we think valuable :

"Intellectual persons are apt to undervalue the means by which their aspirations are wrought out. They do not willingly recognise that the genius of the poet, the wisdom of the legislator, the learning of the student, like the powers of gunpowder, of steam, and of gas, effect nothing but by physical means, and that their results have always been in the proportion of the facilities which those means have afforded."

Again he says:

"In a country where there is no parliament and no press, the bureaucracy rules and restricts everything within its own bounds; and if there were a parliament, without a press, its authority would be scarcely less; but with a parliament and a press, we need not fear the supremacy of the official system; and our aim should be to put it on so complete a footing that it should become an effective aid and ally, and not, as it often is now, a costly hindrance."

On the all-important question of the establishment of a Minister of Justice, Mr. Symonds remarks,

"By the establishment of a Minister having cognisance of matters of Law and Justice, who might preside over the Com

1 In a subsequent portion of the work, however, the author seems to think that the progress Parliament has made in organisation is sufficient for the present, and that further advance in that direction would make it too formidable to the now ill-organised official establishments.