Nor is chance inquiry all a public department has most to fear.  Fifty members of Parliament may be zealous for a particular policy affecting the department, and fifty others for another policy, and between them they may divide its action, spoil its favourite aims, and prevent its consistently working out either of their own aims.  The process is very simple.  Every department at times looks as if it was in a scrape; some apparent blunder, perhaps some real blunder, catches the public eye.  At once the antagonist Parliamentary sections, which want to act on the department, seize the opportunity.  They make speeches, they move for documents, they amass statistics.  They declare “that in no other country is such a policy possible as that which the department is pursuing; that it is mediaeval; that it costs money; that it wastes life; that America does the contrary; that Prussia does the contrary”.  The newspapers follow according to their nature.  These bits of administrative scandal amuse the public.  Articles on them are very easy to write, easy to read, easy to talk about.  They please the vanity of mankind.  We think as we read, “Thank God, I am not as that man; I did not send green coffee to the Crimea; I did not send patent cartridge to the common guns, and common cartridge to the breech loaders. I make money; that miserable public functionary only wastes money”.  As for the defence of the department, no one cares for it or reads it.  Naturally at first hearing it does not sound true.  The Opposition have the unrestricted selection of the point of attack, and they seldom choose a case in which the department, upon the surface of the matter, seems to be right.  The case of first impression will always be that something shameful has happened; that such and such men did die; that this and that gun would not go off; that this or that ship will not sail.  All the pretty reading is unfavourable, and all the praise is very dull.

Nothing is more helpless than such a department in Parliament if it has no authorised official defender.  The wasps of the House fasten on it; here they perceive is something easy to sting, and safe, for it cannot sting in return.  The small grain of foundation for complaint germinates, till it becomes a whole crop.  At once the Minister of the day is appealed to; he is at the head of the administration, and he must put the errors right, if such they are.  The Opposition leader says:  “I put it to the right honourable gentleman, the First Lord of the Treasury.  He is a man of business.  I do not agree with him in his choice of ends, but he is an almost perfect master of methods and means.  What he wishes to do he does do.  Now I appeal to him whether such gratuitous errors, such fatuous incapacity, are to be permitted in the public service.  Perhaps the right honourable gentleman will grant me his attention while I show from the very documents of the departments,” etc., etc.