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29 June 1908.]

CROWN AGENTS' ENQUIRY COMMITTEE:

Sir E. BLAKE, K.C.MA.

should be introduced into the War Office were already would rather wait and see what we do if a vacancy in force in our office. I can assure you that we are very up-to-date office.

1058. 1 am not questioning the excellence of your olice at all, Sir; 1 am only wanting to ascertai whether you can show the Committee some grounds for holding that the constitution of your office affords better protection against the possibility of fraud than the constitution of an orimary Civil Service Depart- ment. That, of course, I cannot speak about, because I do not know of it.

1059. (Chairman.) Your second point is that the bject of the whole organisation of your office is to cnuble the Crown Ageйits to keep a very tight hold over the business?-That is what I have just been describing.

1060. Then you say: "The reorganisation of the staff nicently Clected has had the object of giving gieter elasticity to the office in times of pressure or emergency. The office is now so organised that it could take on almost any amount of work at a moment's notice, subject to the one limitation that it could find accommodation for the necessary increase of staff of the lower grades?”—Yes. You see the office had grown up by degrees, and suddenly we had an enormous access of work thrown upon us in connection. with the Transvaal, and, as I said on the previous Avaston, we are not asked whether we can take the work. We have to cope with it, and instantly I had get clerks wherever 1 could. It is a tradition of the office that we never wimit that we cannot do a thing, and we did do it, but I very soon found that I must make the organisation of the office more elastic, and i have done so. We can deal with almost any- thing now; the office is on a thoroughly elastic basis, and if a great increase of work occurs, we want very little more than to increase at the buttom.

1061. (Mr. Leathes.) Would it not be possible to do that on ordinary Civil Service lines --We do not much admire the Civil Service type of man for purely busi- ness work; we think he is apt to have very hard and fast ideas, and not to have the kind of elasticity that is wanted in a business matter. I am speaking now of purely commercial and financial business.

1002. That would carry you rather far, would it not?

1063, (Sir Francis Monatt.) I think you explained that your comparison is solely with the Colonial Office, as that is the only Department you are acquainted with? Yes.

1064. (Mr. Harris.) Well, Sir Ernest, if that is so, I should like to ask why it is that, as you have your self explained, you have been recruiting from abso- lutely the same men as the Civil Service -For this reason, that we had to recruit very rapidly; as I have just said, we had work thrown upon us, and we had to get assistance where we could, and most fortunately for us there was this class of Civil Service clerks we could get. It was an enormous advantage to us, and I fully appreciate it, and if we had not got them I should have had very great difficulty in laying my hands on the requisite staff; still that does not get over the fact that there are certain ideas in connection with the Civil Service that do not fit in very well with our ideas.

1085. And yet you did rather suggest, I think, that you meant to stick to those men in the future, that is your IV. Class?-No. If you will look at the return I went in you will see that of late we have been trying to recruit from outside more. I do not know whether it is the case, Mr. Leathes, but our Heads of Departments tell me that the boy clerks you are sending out now are not as good as they used to be: I do not know whether that is your experience.

1068, (Mr. Leathes.). Our belief is that they are much itter.--1 am told they are very rough, that occasion- ally they get a very good boy, but they do not think as a rule that they are as good as they used to be.

1067. (Sir Ralph Moor.) As a matter of fact, when you required a secretary in the reconstruction of your office you applied to the Colonial Office for one to be appointed-You are touching on a very delicate point

I would very much rather not discuss it; I

occurs.

1068. (Chairman.) This is interesting, Sir Ernest; we understood from your previous evidence that you did propose with regard to first appointments to rely on the Civil Service to a very large degree —Certainly we do, but we do it propose to rely entirely upoň them; as 1 said, we find these boys have a certain Trade Union feeling amongst them, that they are apt to give themselves airs and to demand this thing and to demand that, which is rather a difficulty in an offico.

1000, You think they are not sufficiently amenable to discipline They are not sufficiently amenable; they are rather unruly.

1070. Too independent ?—Too independent.

1071. (Mr. Gibson.) Are you referring to boy clerks from the Civil Service Commissioners ?—Yes.

1072. But no large oflice recruits its ordinary stra- tum of clerical staff by boy copyists?—No, it is only the best of these boys we take on, and then I am glad to say after a time with us they seem to get into the ideas of the office and to become amenable to discipline. It is the new comers who are unruly.

1073. (Sir Francis Mowatt.) The new comers cannot be affected by the constitution of a Civil Service De- partment?—I am speaking about my own office; I do not pretend to know anything about the Civil Service. My connection with the Civil Service ceased nearly thirty years ago. All I know is that I am very keenly interested in the efficiency of my particular office, and I believe it to be most thoroughly efficient, judging it by its work.

1074. (Chairman.) Before we leave this point, what proportion of your first appointments do you propose should come from the Civil Service and what from the outside I think that is entirely dependent upon the boys we get. I sent you a return the other day of how we have recruited our staff, and there you will we wo have been taking in more from outside, the reason being that we have had some very good lads offered to

08.

1075. (Mr. Gibun.) These two appendices, the first and the second, give the present constitution of your office and not the proposed --Which two appendices do you mean? (The appendices were shown to the witness.)

1076. Those refer to the present and not to the propuse constitution?—The present.

1077. (Chairman.) To go on with your evidence, # considerable number of mien at the bottom of the office have left during the last few years, and you say this has been in the interest of the junior staff gener- ally as affording better prospects to those who remain. Heads of Departments naturally dislike losing trained clerks, but in the interests of the junor clerks them- selves it is desirable to encourage them to leave when- ever a better opening offers ?—Yes, it is so undoubtedly in the interests of the lads themselves.

1078. You go on "If class IV. could always consist of young clerks it would be an ideal arrangement. What is to be feared is the dead level of respectable mediocrity which will probably exist some fifteen or twenty years hence when the class will mainly con- sist of middle-aged men, who will probably have been considered unfit for promotion and who will have nearly or quite reached the maximum salaries they can hope for. It is therefore most desirable that this possibility of promotion from this class to the higher classes shoubi” always be kept open"?--Yes, because then a man does not abandon hope. My experience is that the most difficult men to deal with are those who practically know that they have got to their limit. They then take up the line. “Oh, I am at the end of my career, and I will take it as easily as ever I can " that is a thing which is most destructive to getting good work out of men.

1079. You say, further, arising out of the same thing. "Owing to the nature of nitch of the work in the office and the deadening effect of routine work with its endless details, the brain power of the office must almost pecessarily in the main be that of the Crown Agents"?—Yes, it must be so.

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE.

Sir E. BLAKE, K.C.M.G.

1080. Broadly speaking, you mean that the Crown Agents must be peuple of exceptional capacity and intelligence, but nearly the whole of the rest of the otice are engaged in routine like machines?—The principle of our business is that if anything is not routine it is always brought to a Crown Agent to settle; anything departing from the general broad principles upon which the office is worked is brought to a Crawn Agent to settle.

1081. But if there was an exceptional stress of work, where would your elasticity come in? There are only 24 hours in the day. What would happen in a stress of work? Would you double the number of Crown Agents-If necessary, it could be done, but I think throught to be suflicient with the heads of Departments to do almost any amount of work.

1082. Then the heads of Departments need to have brain power-Undoubtedly they do, but at the same time they curiously enough do suffer from that deaden- ing influence; from time to time they bring forward a thing, that looking at it from the outside one sees at a glance what ought to be done, but it had not occurred to them. It is very dreadfully deadenpig always working at the same class of work.

1983. (Sir Francis Muratt.) Still, surely gentlemen receiving salaries of £700, £800, £750, and £600 aro Lot gentlemen employed solely on routine work 7-May I ask the ones you are referring tol

104. For instance, take class 1. chief clerk and accountant ?—The accountant is in many res

respects the most important position in the office. I am glad to say he is a most excellent accountant, and of very great assistance to me in doing the finance of the office.

You

105, What I wanted to deal with was this. said that the efficiency of your Department had become practically leal now?--I did not say ideal. I said that it was thoroughly efficient. I said that to have young men in the junior classes would be ideal.

1086-1000. Then following up that statement you said that the brain power had to be concentrated in the Crown Agents —No, I did not say that; I said that it would be in the main the Crown Agents.

1091, (Sir Albert Spices) Might I ask with regard 10 class IV.. your junior class, how many of these have got into higher sections?—At present practically only two of them have got in, and they had promises »t promotion from my predecessor. If it had not been log" thuse prontisen, I should probably have kept them in this class up he the present. They would have got promotion afterwards, but they got their promotion practically because they had a promise.

1092. What I wanted to get at was what experience have you had at prosent of your power of develop- ment -All I can say is that some of these boys at the top of class IV. are developing very nicely, and 1 am told by the heals of Departments that they will le quite fit to be turned into section heads when we want them.

1093. All I want to get at is this: what experience have you actually had?--We have had experience of two young men, and they have both done very well. One of them is in our Checking Department, and the other is nb-section hend in the General Stones Department. Both those lads have done very well unded; they have quite answered the expectation.

1094. Is it the custom to put certain men to look after the work of ench Colony ?--No, we deal almost entirely with subjects; in the Works Department to a certain extent we do geographically divide, but the work generally is dealt with on n subject basis and

not on a Colony basis,

1995. So that there is no personality thrown into it in connection with dealing with orders from certain Volonti Not in general questions; it is so in con- nection with the Engineering Stores, because types of rolling stock and such things vary in different places, and deerefore the geographical system is recognised in the setions in this Works Department. Otherwise they are not specialised for any particular Colony,

1008. Which grade would do all the correspondence? Of course, it depends very much; if it was a very simple letter one of these fourth-class clerks would put it forward, and then it would come to a superior officer

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[20 June 1908.

to correct the draft, and then it would go forward, but a great deal of our correspondence is done by memo- randa daresay, as a commercial man, you know what I mean.

1097. I do not think you need explain what a meno- randum is.-The other system is that if a question arises on an estimate or anything like that, we ask questions on one side and get the people to answer

them on the other. It is a very ingenious way of making them keep copies of the correspondence instead of ourselves. Those are all dealt with in the Depart- ments.

1099, Different individuals in the Department do not get into personal touch, so to speak, as far as corres- pondence can be, with the different Colonies, so that every answer is practically a sort of machine answer? -No, it is dealt with as the result of the great experi- ence that the Departments necessarily accumulate.

1000. But surely some of the complaints that I have read from abroad are that there is often shown a lack of local knowledge, and I am directing my questions to finding out whether I can see an explanation of that? Since that was written we have drawn up, and my colleague, Major Cameron, when he comes before you, will bring it to your notice, instructions for indenting, pointing out the requirements they should specify and give information about, and it has improved very much the way in which the indents have come to us. Very frequently in the past they were disgracefully made out, and it is impossible with a changing staff that we should have all the local infomation that is necessary.

1100. Has it ever been tried to have men dealing with different Colonies?—That affects the question of promotion, and it is a cruel thing to a man when it is sometimes said that he is so valuable in his particular place that you cannot move him.

1101. 1 take it that in your office you have always this going on, and therefore one man does not do it all?—No, but if we try to specialise the men to Colo- nies 1 am sure it would break down.

1102. You never have tried it ?—No, except in the cases I have said of our Works Department where the engineering stores are dealt with.

1103. Why have you deal with it specially in the Engineering Department! Because the te are so many curious questions which arise in connection with rail. way materials.

1104. And with local knowledge I take it?—No, it is not local knowledge but the local circumstances. Of course, we rely to a great extent upon the con- sulting engineers for supplying us with all technical knowledge.

1105. (Chairman.) That gives us some insight into the routine of your work, and there is a particularly im. portant point which the Committee wanted to ask about which you referred to in your precis-distribu- tion of work between the different Crown Agents; but before you explain that to us the question we want to ask you is what are the three Crown Agental Are they a Board like the Board of Admiralty or the Board of Inland Revenue-co-equal—a sort of triumvirate with equal powers or are you the head with two sub- ordinates? That is a position that has never, so far as I am aware, been seitled.

1106. Do you sit as a Board?—No, we simply cons sult. 16 tin work a straightforward each Crown Agent deals with his work independently. It is the duty of a junior Crown Agent if any question of principle arises tand when I say it is their duty 1 mean they ought to do it), any fresh departure, to consult the senior Crown Agent, and if there is anything very serious we talk the matter over to- gether, but it has never been distinetly laid down whether the junior Crown Agents are subject to the nior Crown Agut. I am very glad to say that although we three men are as dissimular as I suppose three men could be, we have always manages to work very amicably and to get on, but sometimes it results. in our action being merely a resultant of different.

VDOWS.

1107. If there is a difference of opinion dos your view always prevail? -One generally gives and Tikes, Tat I can imagine that there might be a

case in

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