CIVIL SERVANTS AND POLITICS.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 518, 27 May 1909, Page 4

CIVIL SERVANTS AND POLITICS.

It has come to our knowledge that a number of Civil Servants were placed in a false position yesterd.iV) by an action which should hot be allowed. to be repeated. There are two wholesome laws of the Civil Service which provide that its members shall not take any active part in politics, and that-no canvassing shall be allowed in the Departmental buildings. : Individual Civil Servants have transgressed the .first law —on the wrong side—to their cost, and",tho second has been very strictly enforced. Both laws were,. however, broken yesterday in a special manner. A movement has been started to obtain as many signatures as possible to an expression of approval of the Prime Minister's Dreadnought offer, the signatures being recorded' in an ample volume, which will be presented to Sir Joseph Ward about the time that he is trying to convince Parliament of the necessity of its prorogation to permit him to attend the Imperial Conference. Yesterday a canvasser in this, causes was allowed to take his book into a Government Department, where, on the understanding that the head of the Department and other under-sccretarics had authorised the proceeding, members of the staff duly attached their signatures to tho testimonial, which had, indeed, been signed by their own Departmental head. Numerous other signatures of. Civil Servants which appeared in the book boTe out the statement of • the canvasser that he had previously collected names from other Departments. , It is obvious that the Civil Servant who is approached on such a mission during, his working hours, and after an example has been set him by his superior officer, is not in the same position to make a free decision as would bo any private citizen, "or even, perhaps, the Civil Servant himself away from his official environment. It is a mitigating circumstance that no Ministerial authority. was asked or given for this canvass, Jiut a regulation of the Service . which "broblbits ordinary Usui udi'au

Ministers' have refused' to suspend for harmless and even worthy objects, should not bo even tacitly set aside by Departmental heads for'the purpose of endorsing a political action, and thereby really 'infringing a still more important principle of the Service. It will'be a Ministerial duty to ensure that no further signatures to a testimonial of the kind are solicited from Civil Servants in their working hours.