The Secretary for Scotland is the head of all the departments of administration, and being the head of all, is not likely to know, intimately, much about any of them. He has his parliamentary duties to attend to, and the more they press on him the more administrative work must he leave to the permanent heads of the departments. One Secretary of State may obtain, and may deserve, a better reputation for administrative capacity than another; but it is absolutely impossible to expect any one man to know intimately the details of the work of all the departments. He is responsible for education, for instance, but what can he know personally of the educational needs of a boy in the east end of Glasgow? Yet he prescribes for the education of all boys, as though it were easier to know about thousands than about one. As head of the Local Government Board, he has to state what amount of relief should be given to poor people in different parts of Scotland, what amount in grant should be given to distress committees, and what kind of work the unemployed should do. He never is a man who has had any experimental acquaintance with poverty, or who knows by experience what distress is entailed in a working-class family by dull trade; and manual labour has not been his occupation. Yet it is not the representatives of these people who instruct him. It is the Board of which he is the head, and whose members, however able they may be, are less in contact with those for whom they prescribe than he is. He is head of the prisons department, and he may now and then visit a prison; but even a Secretary of State, one might go further and say, especially a Secretary of State, cannot gain much intimate knowledge of prisons and prisoners from a casual visit. He has too many things to do, and the man who has too many things to do seldom does anything. He leaves that to his assistants. If Solomon undertook and tried to do as many things as a Secretary of State is supposed to do, he would lose his reputation for wisdom in a week; but he wouldn't be Solomon if he tried; and so the Secretary of State, on the advice he receives, has to determine the fate of the prisoner who is under sentence of preventive detention. Once in three years every such person has to come under his notice. This can only be done through reports.