There was another class of officials, in some respects the most meritorious: these were the clerks. They were appointed in the ordinary way of the Civil Service, and rose to great eminence in their class. I imagine they worked with reasonable diligence during office hours, and if they spent some part of the time on the Civil Service Co-operative Store, and similar toys, that is better than writing poetry on office paper in office hours; which was the crime laid at the doors of the examiners. During the thirty-five years of my correspondence with the Office I think I saw only three of these excellent men, but I knew by name and high repute many more. Their mission in life was to keep the examiners in the straight path, and at times they treated both them and the younger inspectors much as a caddie treats a beginner at the game of golf; or, to put it more respectfully, as an old sergeant treats a newly-joined subaltern. Their merit was accuracy and trustworthiness; their foible was pedantry. In a treatise blending the Politics with the Ethics, Aristotle would have said that the virtue of a Civil Servant’s life was Orderly Method; its Defect is Muddle; and its Excess is Red Tape. As a rule the higher branches of the service lean to the Defect, and the lower to the Excess. The critic of Ministerial and official disasters would do well to bear this in mind when he is seeking a victim to denounce. Among the three clerks whom I met, there was one who gave me some remarkable information. It was in my early days, and I had recently met an angry Welshman on the church side, who complained that his party did not get fair-play. There was a certain Welshman, whom we may call Jones, highly placed in the Red Tape and Sealing Wax Office, discovered by Anthony Trollope. Jones was strong on the chapel side, and according to my complainant, when there was any special controversy about schools raging at the Education Department, Jones got access to the correspondence, and put his party in possession of the case for the other side. I had declared that the story was absurd: Jones had no access to the portfolios of another Office; also it would be dishonourable, and it would be a breach of etiquette, and so on. Now, finding that the clerk whose room I was visiting had a pile of portfolios on his table, it suddenly occurred to me to ask: “Suppose Mr. Jones of the Red Tape Office sent to you for one of these files, would you let him have it?” “Certainly; they have a right to see our files, and we have a right to see theirs.” I made no further enquiry, and I did not communicate the result to my Welsh acquaintance. He might have replied that there was what logicians call “an undistributed middle” in the story; but that if it is found (1) that A. B. is improperly using private information; and (2) that A. B. has access to documents containing that information, one may reasonably assume (3) that A. B. went to the private documents for his private information.