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