A " BLIND-ALLEY '' SERVICE

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLVI, Issue XLVI, 25 April 1914, Page 4

A " BLIND-ALLEY '' SERVICE

Mr Arnold White has been describing the British public service in terms which should encourage New Zealand to avoid the conditions and resist the tendencies which have brought about such deplorable results in England. '• "When (says Mr White) the story of our Home Civil Service is written in the next century by a sagacious and accurate chronicler it will be found that the cost, the waste, and the stupidity of Government administration in 1914 is attributable to the sedulous care with which hope and the desire to rise are frozen by Departmental regulations that prevent the majority of Government employees from being interested in their work. The Post Office, employing more than 100,000 men, is normally in a state of veiled insurrection, because the one reform that would content the efficient worker m shirked by both political parties. That long-delayed reform is merely to rouse the interest of every Government servant in the work he is paid to perform by adopting Napoleon's plan of placing the baton of a field-marshal &t the bottom of the knapsack of every private. Fron the time of the Revolution the United States have adopted Napoleon's plan in their Government service, on American railways, and in business life. The blight of mediocrity that settles like a fog over Britain is exhaled from a stagnant soil of privilege, nepotism, precedent, seniority, and worship of ' good form.' I know men in the Second Division of the Civil Service whose brains, character, manners, energy, and ambition would infallibly have raised them to wealth and fame had they begun life in the United States, in the Argentine, or in the Dominions. The blindalley employments of British van-boys (and messengers are typical of the blind-alley employments of the remainder of the British people. It is natural that people should take little interest in their work when they are denied opportunities of distinction. Plums in the Civil Service are exclusively reserved for a Brahmin caste protected from competition by an artificial and useless barriei elected by University degrees. Were this barrier thrown down; were sound suggestion encouraged and rewarded, were thrift made profitable, and were each rung on the ladder to the highest appointments made accessible to the humblest official, servants of the State would take new interest in State work." We do not say that seeds likely to lead to such a crop of consequences have been sown in connection with the public service of New Zealand, or are now being sown in any shape or form, but, obviously, it will indeed be well for the country if an emphatic negative can be given to any question that may be put in either category.