The extent of the control exerted in the national administration by the permanent officials is forcibly illustrated by the history of the Colonial Office. My colleague, Professor Edward Channing, has pointed out to me that the records of the American colonies reveal how largely the Committee for Trade and Plantations was in the hands of Blathwayt, its secretary. In spite of all the violent political upheavals of the time that functionary retained his post without interruption from the latter part of the reign of Charles II. until some years after the revolution of 1688; and if a colony wanted anything done by the home government it was he that must be persuaded, sometimes by inducements of a pecuniary nature. The power, but happily not the corruption, of the permanent officials in the Colonial Office can be traced still more clearly at a much later time. In 1839 Lord Durham, in his famous "Report on the Affairs of British North America," complains that owing to the repeated changes in the political chiefs of the Colonial Office, the real management of the colonies fell into the hands of "the permanent but utterly irresponsible members of the office"; and he quotes from a report made in the preceding year by a select committee of the Assembly of Upper Canada, to show that this was felt by the colonists themselves as a grievance.[177:1] The group of English colonial reformers, with whom Lord Durham was associated, held the same opinion. Gibbon Wakefield tells us, in his "View of the Art of Colonization" that "The great bulk, accordingly, of the labours of the office are performed, as the greater portion of its legislative and executive authority is necessarily wielded, by the permanent under-secretary and the superior clerks."[177:2] Wakefield and his school disapproved of the colonial policy of the day, and disliked cordially the permanent officials and their methods. "Our colonial system of government," Wakefield adds, "is the bureaucratic, spoiled by being grafted on to free institutions."[178:1] He had a special aversion for Sir James Stephen--long the legal adviser, and afterwards permanent under-secretary, to the Colonial Office--whom he regarded as the archetype, if not the founder, of the class of officials that had become the real arbiters of the destinies of the colonial empire.[178:2] [Sidenote: Mr. Mothercountry.]