THE CIVIL SERVANT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9163, 11 August 1908, Page 4

THE CIVIL SERVANT.

Lord Curzon had something to say the other day, in an interview, in favour of that much abused person, the English Civil Servant. Lord Curzon tried to enlighten the public as to his real value to the State. The public did not realise when they read replies to Parliamentary questions, that they were not, as a rule, the work of Ministers, but of Civil Servants working outside the limelight. So dependent were Ministers on the Civil Service that a special gallery had been set apart in the House of Commons for Civil Servants, a sort of prompter's box to which signals of distress were transmitted by Ministers in difficulties, and whither Ministers repaired from time to time "to seek more sustenance from the hand by which they were habitually fed." Lord Curzon suspected that Budgets, supposed to bo the finest product of the Ministerial brain, were really the work of Treasury clerks, and he remembered hearing of a Chancellor of the Exchequer who had placed before him three alternative Budgets, composed by Treasury officials, and could make hi* selection* only by tossing up But in spite of its power,the Civil Service hiul never been, and was nevsr likely to be, dangerous to the State.