TOO MANY MISTAKES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 60, Issue 4235, 24 January 1940, Page 9

TOO MANY MISTAKES

BUREAUCRATS IN WARTIME. “Busy though they are in so • many other directions,” asserts the ; “Sunday Times” (London), “Ministers can hardly afford to delay longer a critical overhaul of the mistakes which during the past two months the bureaucracy has committed in their name. In the early days of the war orders and regulations, more or less inevitably, were poured out in a flood, of which it was impossible that full account should be taken even by the. Minister responsible m each case, let alone by the Cabinet or the House of Commons. The resulting mischiefs are, in not a few instances, enormous, and in many others serious and indefensible.

The case for stopping them is urgent. But the difficulty is, that, in setting up controls there were also set up controllers, and the bureaucratic interests now rooted in thousands of new posts will need to be uprooted. Civil servants have the defects of their qualities; good administrators are apt to be ambitious, and their desire to extend their jurisdiction is too seldom- tempered by any familiarity with the methods and mainsprings of non-governmental business, or with the delicate interdependence of its workings*