First, as to bureaucracy. It is manifest that there has been an immense
increase in the number, the functions, and the power of public
officials. This is not merely due to the war. It has been going on for a
long time--ever since, in fact, we began the deliberate process of
national reconstruction in the years following 1832. In itself this
increase has not been a bad thing; on the contrary, it has been the only
possible means of carrying into effect the great series of reforms which
marked the nineteenth century. And may I here underline the fact that we
Liberals, in particular, have no right to criticise the process, since
we have been mainly responsible for it, at any rate in all its early
stages. When our predecessors set up the first Factory Inspectors in
1833, and so rendered possible the creation of a whole code of factory
laws; when they created the first rudimentary Education Office in 1839,
and so set to work the men who have really moulded our national system
of education; when they set up a bureaucratic Poor Law Board in 1841,
which shaped our Poor Law Policy, and a Public Health Board in 1848,
which gradually worked out our system of Public Health--when they did
these things, they were beginning a process which has been carried
further with every decade. If you like, they were laying the foundations
of bureaucracy; but they were also creating the only machinery by which
vast, beneficial and desperately needed measures of social reform could
be carried into effect.
And there is yet another thing for which Liberalism must assume the
responsibility. When Gladstone instituted the Civil Service Commission
in 1853, and the system of appointment by competitive examination in
1870, he freed the Civil Service from the reputation for corruption and
inefficiency which had clung to it; and he ensured that it should
attract, as it has ever since done, much of the best intellect of the
nation. But this very fact inevitably increased the influence of the
Civil Service, and encouraged the expansion of its functions. If you put
a body of very able men in charge of a department of public service, it
is certain that they will magnify their office, take a disproportionate
view of its claims, and incessantly strive to increase its functions and
its staff. This is not only natural, it is healthy--so long as the
process is subjected to efficient criticism and control.
But the plain fact is that the control is inadequate. The vast machine
of government has outgrown the power of the controlling mechanism.
We trust for the control of the immense bureaucratic machine, almost
entirely to the presence, at the head of each department, of a political
minister directly responsible to Parliament. We hold the minister
responsible for everything that happens in his office, and we regard
this ministerial responsibility as one of the keystones of our system.
But when we reflect that the minister is distracted by a multitude of
other calls upon his time, and that he has to deal with officials who
are generally his equals in ability, and always his superiors in special
knowledge; when we realise how impossible it is that a tithe of the
multifarious business of a great department should come before him, and
that the business which does come before him comes with the
recommendations for action of men who know ten times more about it than
he does, it must be obvious that the responsibility of the minister must
be quite unreal, in regard to the normal working of the office. One
thing alone he can do, and it is an important thing, quite big enough to
occupy his attention. He can make sure that the broad policy of the
office, and its big new departures, are in accord with the ideas of the
majority in Parliament, and are co-ordinated, through the Cabinet, with
the policy of the other departments. That, indeed, is the true function
of a minister; and if he tries to make his responsibility real beyond
that, he may easily neglect his main work. Beyond this consideration of
broad policy, I do not hesitate to say that the theory of ministerial
responsibility is not a check upon the growth of bureaucracy, but is
rather the cover under which bureaucracy has grown up. For the position
of the minister enables him, and almost compels him, to use his
influence in Parliament for the purpose of diverting or minimising
parliamentary criticism.