In what I have called the "working machine" of government there are two distinct elements. First, there is the large, permanent, professional staff, the Civil Service; secondly, there is the policy-directing body, the Cabinet. Both of these are the objects of a great deal of contemporary criticism. On the one hand, we are told that we are suffering from "bureaucracy," which means that the permanent officials have too much independent and uncontrolled, or imperfectly controlled, authority. On the other hand, we are told that we are suffering from Cabinet dictatorship, or, alternatively, that the Cabinet system is breaking down and being replaced by the autocracy of the Prime Minister. There is a good deal of _prima facie_ justification for all these complaints. THE GROWTH OF THE CIVIL SERVICE First, as to bureaucracy. It is manifest that there has been an immense increase in the number, the functions, and the power of public officials. This is not merely due to the war. It has been going on for a long time--ever since, in fact, we began the deliberate process of national reconstruction in the years following 1832. In itself this increase has not been a bad thing; on the contrary, it has been the only possible means of carrying into effect the great series of reforms which marked the nineteenth century. And may I here underline the fact that we Liberals, in particular, have no right to criticise the process, since we have been mainly responsible for it, at any rate in all its early stages. When our predecessors set up the first Factory Inspectors in 1833, and so rendered possible the creation of a whole code of factory laws; when they created the first rudimentary Education Office in 1839, and so set to work the men who have really moulded our national system of education; when they set up a bureaucratic Poor Law Board in 1841, which shaped our Poor Law Policy, and a Public Health Board in 1848, which gradually worked out our system of Public Health--when they did these things, they were beginning a process which has been carried further with every decade. If you like, they were laying the foundations of bureaucracy; but they were also creating the only machinery by which vast, beneficial and desperately needed measures of social reform could be carried into effect.