with the majority in Parliament, and to ensure this, some measure of the parliamentary element must be infused into every part of the governing body. Recent administrative reforms, however, have all tended to reduce the proportion of the political element, by recognising the supreme authority and responsibility of the parliamentary chief of each department; he must be held accountable for the weakness or efficiency of all his subordinates, and every member of the ministry must share with him in this responsibility" ment not to inter subordi Having thus secured an adequate responsibility for Parliathe efficient administration of the whole public service, by means of the control which is exercised by Parlia- fere with ment over cabinet ministers, Parliament should carefully nates. abstain from any direct interference with the subordinate officers of government. Such persons can only receive instructions as to the performance of their official functions from a responsible minister of the crown." It is competent to any member of the legislature to call the attention of Parliament to abuses or irregularities in the conduct of business in any department of state; but the intention to submit a case of complaint to the notice of either House ought first to be communicated to the department concerned, so as to afford an opportunity for the redress of the particular grievance. If no remedy be thus obtainable, it would be proper to appeal to the House to appoint a committee of enquiry." hold For it is not the departments which govern; they, But to strictly speaking, are only advisers of those who govern. ministers A department ought not to be held responsible in any ble for all. way, for very often the advice of the department is not responsi taken,' Those who are responsible for the conduct of the public policy must act as they think fit.'i Upon this principle Mr. Lowe, the vice-president of the committee of council on education (and a member of the administration, though not of the cabinet), notwithstanding that he was the working head of the Education Department, declared that he should not have thought it necessary to resign his office-when the House of Commons, on April 12, 1864, passed a vote of censure upon the department for the alleged 'mutilation' of inspectors' reports had it not been that he considered his personal honour and veracity to have been impugned. He thus defined his position, in reference to the vote of censure, before a committee of the House of Commons: "The department was censured, but that would not have concerned me ; that would have been the government's look out. I considered my personal honour was struck at, which caused me to resign.'j For the same reason, it is equally clear, that while the Houses of Parliament are at liberty to express their opinion as to the manner in which any department of the public service is conducted, they should never attempt to impute blame in such matters to the nonpolitical servants of the crown: excepting, of course, in cases of personal misconduct. The following cases will illustrate this doctrine :-An enquiry by the House of Lords, in 1841, into the conduct of Mr. Stanley, assistant secretary to the Irish poor law commission, in making an alteration in a paper ordered to be laid before Parliament, after receiving such order.k Debates in the House of Commons in the years 1872-74 in regard to the conduct of the commissioners of national education in Ireland, in dismissing the Rev. Mr. O'Keeffe from the office of manager of the Callan schools, in obedience to a rescript from Rome. Debate in the House of Commons in May 1874, on a proposed vote of censure upon Lord Sandhurst, commander of the forces in Ireland, for alleged official irregularities, which was negatived, without a division.1 But, under any circumstances, responsibility for the actions of subordinates should always be fixed upon their political heads. 'If ministers find that the (permanent) officers of the departments do not work well under them, then it is their duty to devise some remedy for this inconvenience; but the responsibility should not be divided, it should be imposed only on those who are able to answer for themselves in the House.'" Thus, in 1873, the Committee of Public Accounts reported unfavourably of the financial administration of the Post Office, and expressly disapproved of the proceedings of Mr. Scudamore, the second secretary of the department, in appropriating enormous cash balances on hand to a particular service, without the knowledge of the Treasury, or the authority of Parliament. But in a debate in the House of Commons upon these transactions, Mr. Gladstone (first lord of the treasury) observed that Mr. Scudamore's conduct might be very properly animadverted upon in a report of a committee, but that he was not a fit subject for the censure of the House. It is the political officers of this House who stand between the permanent officers and its censure.' And the House is bound to take the utmost care to avoid the cardinal error of treating the permanent servants of the Post Office as proper objects of parliamentary censure.'" 6 6 political It is of the first importance to the public interests Good unthat the best possible understanding should prevail be- ing be tween the permanent officers of the crown and their tween political chiefs. This can only be ensured by reciprocal and perconfidence and respect; and nothing has contributed manent more to elevate the English administrative system to its present high standard of excellence than the uniform Sir Charles Wood, Hans. D. v. 161, p. 1266; Mr. Gladstone, ib. p. 2035; and see v. 162, p. 1392; Mr. Disraeli, ib. v. 195, p. 40; Sir Wm. Dunbar, comp. and aud. genl. in Corresp. &c. on Exch. and Audit • Hans. D. v. 217, p. 1229. officers. Excel lence of the British civil service. maintenance of a spirit of hearty co-operation and mutual good-will between the political and permanent servants of the crown, totally irrespective of personal opinions upon the politics of the day. Witness the testimony of Mr. Disraeli, in reference to his first appointment as chancellor of the exchequer, in 1852 : When I went to the Treasury the principal permanent civil servants of the crown were all men of even extreme Liberal opinions. They had been appointed by the previous government, and of course they were, in their opinions, hostile to our government; but I treated them with implicit confidence, and they served me with the greatest zeal and fidelity, I may say even with devotion.' The permanent civil officers,' he added, did their duty cordially and completely; and they would do their duty cordially and completely to-morrow, if there were a change of government; that is my decided opinion.' It is unquestionably the bounden duty of all public servants-whether they owe their appointments, in the first instance, to political preferences, or not to show the utmost fidelity towards their official superiors, for the time being, otherwise they would be justly amenable to censure and removal from office." Permanent civil servants, of the higher grade, should, moreover, be free to express, to their political chiefs, their opinions upon any matter under consideration. But once an act has been decided upon, it is not becoming in them to criticise, or comment unfavourably upon the proceedings of government in relation thereto." An equally emphatic acknowledgment of the integrity, ability and zeal displayed by the subordinate officers of the crown in Great Britain will be found in a paper laid before Parliament in 1868, which contains a series of letters written by the several secretaries of state for foreign affairs, from 1834 to 1866, upon the occasion P Report on Dockyard Appointments, Com. Pap. 1852-3, v. 25, pp. 300, 301. See further on this subject, ante, vol. 1, p. 629, &c. Third Rep. Com". Civ. Serv. Exp. p. 232, Com. Pap. 1873, v. 7. of their quitting office. These letters vie with one another in expressions of esteem and gratitude for the able and indefatigable assistance rendered by the clerks of the Foreign Office of every grade, to the minister in charge of that important department." Similar testimony to the efficiency and honesty which characterise the permanent civil service of Great Britain will be found in reports submitted to the Congress of the United States in 1868 to 1874, in favour of the introduction of a new rule of appointments in the public offices at Washington and elsewhere, requiring positions in a higher grade to be filled from the grades below, with such provisions as would ensure the retention of competent clerks through every change of administration ;-thereby exchanging the objectionable and demoralising system hitherto prevailing in that country, for the English civil service tenure.t Within the last ten years considerable improvements have been effected in the organisation and internal economy of the various departments of state in Great Britain. The dissatisfaction so universally felt by the nation at the conduct of the Russian war, and the widespread conviction that the disasters attending the early Crimean campaigns were mainly attributable to the inefficiency of the public departments, gave rise to a political agitation, whose rallying cry was Administrative Adminis reform.' A society was formed to effect this object, but trative it soon became apparent that, however necessary it was that some alterations should be made in the machinery of the state, this association was wholly incompetent to devise appropriate remedies. Accordingly, it failed to secure any perceptible hold either upon the sympathies of the country at large or upon the convictions of the more intelligent portion of the community. Moreover, the speeches in Parliament of the leaders of the movement indicated an absence of any clear conception of Statement respecting Foreign Office Agencies, 1868, p. 19, Com. Pap. 1867-8, v. 40. Mr. Otway's Evid. in 1st Rep. Come. Diplom. Serv. Com. Pap. 1871, v. 7. Letter of H. M'Culloch, secretary of the treasury, dated January 29, 1868, on re-organisation of Trea- reform. |