To the general public indeed, the adoption of open competition in 1870 seemed to obviate any necessity for further consideration not only of the method by which officials were appointed but also of the system under which they did their work. The race of Tite Barnacles, they learnt, was now to become extinct. Appointment was to be by 'merit,' and the announcement of the examination results, like the wedding in a middle-Victorian novel, was to be the end of the story. But in a Government office, as certainly as in a law-court or a laboratory, effective thinking will not be done unless adequate opportunities and motives are secured by organisation during the whole working life of the appointed officials. Since 1870, however, the organisation of the Government Departments has either been left to the casual development of office tradition in each Department or has been changed (as in the case of the War Office) by an agitation directed against one Department only. The official relations, for instance, between the First Division minority and the Second Division majority of the clerks in each office vary, not on any considered principle, but according to the opinions and prejudices of some once-dominant but now forgotten chief. The same is true of the relation between the heads of each section and the officials immediately below them. In at least one office important papers are brought first to the chief. His decision is at once given and is sent down the hierarchy for elaboration. In other offices the younger men are given invaluable experience, and the elder men are prevented from getting into an official rut by a system which requires that all papers should be sent first to a junior, who sends them up to his senior accompanied not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute of his own suggesting official action. One of these two types of organisation must in fact be better than the other, but no one has systematically compared them. In the Colonial Office, again, it is the duty of the Librarian to see that the published books as well as the office records on any question are available for every official who has to report on it. In the Board of Trade, which deals with subjects on which the importance of published as compared with official information is even greater, room has only just been found for a technical library which was collected many years ago.[94] The Foreign Office and the India Office have libraries, the Treasury and the Local Government Board have none. [94] For a long time the Library of the Board of Trade was kept at the Foreign Office. In the Exchequer and Audit Department a deliberate policy has been adopted of training junior officials by transferring them at regular intervals to different branches of the work. The results are said to be excellent, but nothing of the kind is systematically done or has even been seriously discussed in any other Department which I know.