e) by an agitation directed against one Department only.
The official relations, for instance, between the First Division
minority and the Second Division majority of the clerks in each office
vary, not on any considered principle, but according to the opinions and
prejudices of some once-dominant but now forgotten chief. The same is
true of the relation between the heads of each section and the officials
immediately below them. In at least one office important papers are
brought first to the chief. His decision is at once given and is sent
down the hierarchy for elaboration. In other offices the younger men are
given invaluable experience, and the elder men are prevented from
getting into an official rut by a system which requires that all papers
should be sent first to a junior, who sends them up to his senior
accompanied not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute of his
own suggesting official action. One of these two types of organisation
must in fact be better than the other, but no one has systematically
compared them.

In the Colonial Office, again, it is the duty of the Librarian to see
that the published books as well as the office records on any question
are available for every official who has to report on it. In the Board
of Trade, which deals with subjects on which the importance of published
as compared with official information is even greater, room has only
just been found for a technical library which was collected many years
ago.[94] The Foreign Office and the India Office have libraries, the
Treasury and the Local Government Board have none.

[94] For a long time the Library of the Board of Trade was kept at the
Foreign Office.

In the Exchequer and Audit Department a deliberate policy has been
adopted of training junior officials by transferring them at regular
intervals to different branches of the work. The results are said to be
excellent, but nothing of the kind is systematically done or has even
been seriously discussed in any other Department which I know.

Nearly all departmental officials are concerned with the organisation
of non-departmental work more directly executive than their own, and
part of a wise system of official training would consist in 'seconding'
young officials for experience in the kind of work which they are to
organise. The clerks of the Board of Agriculture should be sent at least
once in their career to help in superintending the killing of infected
swine