any

letter which ran: 'Dear Mother, I hope you are quite well. Your loving son, Alfred. P.S.-Please send me five shillings' would seem to him to be too abrupt in its greediness. Hence the child racks his brains to recall incident of the day that may be worth mentioning to his elders. He is, as a rule, inarticulate as regards his affections, and he is not old enough to take pleasure in describing things seen or experienced. His letter, if he lengthens it, is a bald record of fact-people seen, drives, games. As length itself is an object, however, and he has a feeling that he ought to fill all the four sides of the notepaper, there is no fact too prosaic for him to set down. As he grows older, he becomes more critical as to the sort of facts that are worth setting down, and he adds the fear of dullness to the fear of brevity.

Now, there could be no greater preventives of letter-writing than the fear of being dull combined with the fear of being brief. The former forbids long letters; the latter forbids short ones. That is the reason why many people never answer letters. It is not that they do not compose the answers, but that they do not send them. They lie awake at night composing them. We know a man who still spends sleepless nights composing a letter in reply to a second cousin in Australia who wrote to him eleven years ago to congratulate him on his engagement. It is not the same letter that it used to be. It has altered with the years. It had to be rewritten when the man married. It had to be revised when the first child was born. The birth of the second child was another piece of news that had to be embodied in it. And now that the eldest child is nine, and a prize-winner at school, even the second child's birth seems a little out of date. And not only the narrative of the letter has changed from year to year, but the apologies

with which the letter opens. At first, it was: 'My dear Cousin,- I owe you a thousand apologies, but as a matter of fact I was so pressed for time, what with my work and with house-hunting

...

'Then it changed to: 'I'm sure you will understand, but what with all the anxiety I have gone through owing to my wife's illness . . .' Later on, he justified himself by relating how he had been moving into a larger house and one of the children had had whooping-cough. Wearying of the illness of the rest of the family, he began to deceive himself into inventing a long record of bad health for himself. He also referred vaguely to 'financial troubles,' though he found it difficult to remember any. Then there was overwork, then there was the war, then there was influenza. His latest letter is full of influenza. It is difficult to spread influenza thin enough to make it cover eleven years; but people who do not write letters are perfectly brazen when it comes to making excuses. They will go to almost any lengths in order to avoid making the frank confession that they suffer from the disease of epistolophobia. There are few commoner diseases, and yet there is no pity for the victims. They are universally accused of rudeness, ingratitude, and pride. Their silence is regarded as insulting when it is really flattering. It is the silence of men who are not content to scribble off any old rubbish with a feeling that that will do well enough for their correspondents. They respect their correspondents too highly. And so they wait till they have something to say and time to say it. The further off the correspondent is, moreover, the more particular they are as to what they say. A letter that will do for Sevenoaks does not seem quite worth sending to India. As for Australia, one sits down to a letter to Australia in the mood of a man pre

paring to write a history of the civilized world. We do not know if every body has this materialistic sense of space. We confess we have it strongly. We sincerely sympathize with the man whose second cousin in Australia congratulated him on his engagement. A letter from Australia throws a responsibility on a man from which the boldest may well shrink.

And yet, if there are good excuses for not writing to Australia, there are still better excuses for not writing to anyone at a less distance. After all, the infrequency with which one sees one's Australian friends rather calls for an exchange of letters. When one has a letter from anywhere nearer home, however, one has always an idea that one may be seeing the writer before long and that there is no need to waste time in correspondence. There is a good deal to be said for answering urgent letters by telegram. The letter that cannot be answered in a telegram does not need to be answered at all. It is, we suppose, a good thing for the revenue that so many superfluous letters are written, but there is no denying that three quarters of the letters written are unnecessary. What we protest against is the indignation of the people who like writing letters against the rudeness of the people who hate writing letters. There is a popular idea that letter-writing should be a matter of give-and-take. This is most unfair to the people to whom letter-writing is a form of torture. A. likes writing letters, and so he self-indulgently writes to B.; B. loathes writing letters, and he suffers anguish because he feels he is being rude in not answering A. at once. A. has all the pleasure of the correspondence, B. has all the pains. They might both be perfectly happy if it were generally recognized that their natures are different, and that A. should write all the letters, seeing that

he enjoys writing. We have met many good conversationalists who are more than willing to carry on a one-sided conversation. Why is it that no one is willing to carry on a one-sided correspondence? Why should a letter be paid for by a letter? We are surely not merchants and hucksters in our friendship.

Anyhow, it is a safe rule that the only letters worth receiving are those from people who enjoy writing them. Letter-writing calls for that spontaneous overflow of the emotions that Wordsworth demanded in poetry. Walpole, Boswell, Cowper, and Lamb were all natural chatterboxes with the pen. Boswell simply had to tell somebody, so he told his friend Temple. His letters are not tasks of friendship. They are things bursting to be written. They are the bubbling confessions of an egotist, as when he complains that his old Scottish father cannot appreciate him:

I write to him with warmth, with an honest pride, wishing that he should think of me as I am; but my letters shock him, and every expression in them is interpreted unfavorably. . . . Temple, would you not like such a son? Would you not feel a glow of parental joy? I know you would; and yet my worthy father writes to me in the manner you see, with that Scots strength Briton. But he is offended with the fire of sarcasm which is peculiar to a North which you and I cherish as the essence of our souls; and how can I make him happy? Am I bound to do so at the expense, not of this or the other agreeable wish, but at the expense of myself? The time was when such a letter from my father as the one I enclose would have depressed; but I am now firm, and, as my revered friend, Mr. Samuel Johnson, used to say, I feel the privileges of an independent human being.

Lamb's letters, again, are obviously the work of a man who enjoyed writing them. Even when he writes to apologize to Dr. and Mrs. Asbury for having got drunk at a party in their house, he describes how he had to be carried

home with more relish than shame. In the course of the letter he writes:

But then you will say: What a shocking sight to see a middle-aged gentleman-anda-half riding upon a Gentleman's back up Parson's Lane at midnight! Exactly the time for that sort of conveyance, when nobody can see him, nobody but Heaven and his own conscience; now Heaven makes fools, and don't expect much from her own creation; and as for conscience, She and I have long since come to a compromise. I have given up false modesty, and she allows me to abate a little of the true. I like to be liked, but I don't care about being respected. I don't respect myself. But, as I was saying, I thought he would have let me down just as we got to Lieutenant Barker's Coal-shed (or emporium), but by a cunning jerk I eased myself, and

righted my posture. I protest, I thought

myself in a palanquin, and never felt myself so grandly carried. It was a slave under me. There was I, all but my reason. And what is reason? and what is the loss of it? and how often in a day do we do without it, just as well? Reason is only counting, two and two makes four. And if on my passage home I thought it made five, what

The New Statesman

matter? Two and two will just make four, as it always did, before I took the finishing glass that did my business. My sister has begged me to write an apology to Mrs. A. and you for disgracing your party; now it does seem to me, that I rather honored your party, for everyone that was not drunk (and one or two of the ladies, I am sure, were not) must have been set off greatly in the contrast to me. I was the scapegoat. The soberer they seemed. By the way, is magnesia good on these occasions? iii pol: med: sum: ante noct: in rub: can: I am no licentiate, but know enough of simples to beg you to send me a draught after this model.

Who would not write letters if he could write after this fashion? Lamb obviously enjoyed his letter as much as he enjoyed his liquor. With him, clearly, letter-writing was a form of self-indulgence. That is what letterwriting should always be. If we regard letter-writing in this light, those of us who seldom answer letters have quite as good a right to plume ourselves on our superior morality as teetotalers have.

HOSTILITIES have ceased, and our greatest war-time Government Department is already in dissolution its staff in its thousands is being demobilized, and some of the hotels it has long occupied may shortly be handed back to their rightful owners.

Some one will, probably, some time in the long years of peace and reconstruction which are opening before us, chronicle our official doings in the official style; but the official chronicler will not mention any of the unofficial doings and misdoings that are related here, and one who has known the Ministry from start to finish may

perhaps be forgiven for thinking that their omission will detract from the value of the record.

From a modest platoon of perhaps a couple of hundred working in a halffinished building in Whitehall Place, which was intended to house the Board of Agriculture, in an engineering headquarters at far-away Storey's Gate, and in an eighteenth-century residence in Whitehall Gardens, we have grown into a respectable division of five-and-twenty thousand men and women, scattered far and wide in the hotels and museums of the Metropolis. From being the humble handmaid of

the War Office for the purchase of ammunition from whatever source it might be gleaned, we have become a mighty organization with branches in almost every allied country, directing the industry of the Empire, and controlling the raw material resources of half the globe. If Mr. Lloyd George claims that he made us, we can equally claim that we made Mr. Lloyd George and gave to the Alliance a leader more potent and popular than the great Pitt himself.

But our beginnings were very humble, and doubtless our mistakes were numerous enough to justify the caustic comment that, when the cow's head was removed from over the door of the newly-christened Armament Buildings, it would have been more appropriate to have substituted that of a jackass.

Six Whitehall Gardens was the residence of the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary, and the little band of Board of Trade officials who formed the nucleus of the Labor Department that has been so ignorantly and bitterly criticized throughout its existence; away down in Storey's Gate were the chemists and scientists who who were planning the production of explosives and propellants on a scale hitherto undreamed of; while the rest of us, constituting the department of the Director-General of Munitions Supply, and consisting of a heterogeneous collection of civil servants and volunteers from the city and the business world, made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the cheerless recesses of Armament Buildings. We worked under a group of 'captains of industry' who were popularly styled 'Men of Push and Go,' and whose function was to see that we did not throttle ourselves with red tape, and to impart the requisite 'hustle' to our dealings with contractors. Poor fellows, for many a long month they fared no better than

the rest of us. Their palatial rooms they had to share with armies of workmen, busy putting in telephones and lights and radiators, and even such primitive requirements as windowframes and doors - for we took possession of a mere shell of a building, and it was many weeks before a lift carried us to the higher floors. They suffered, too, from the Registry system, or the want of it. A 'captain of industry' is not accustomed to the writing of minutes he gives his orders over the phone and his papers are filed ready to hand in such a way that they can be called for and found at a moment's notice. But in a Government Office things are done differently; everything is recorded in minutes, and the minutes are put into files, and the files are all neatly stacked in a Registry, and can be produced in due course when requisitioned in the appropriate at least that is the idea, and in pre-war days it probably worked well, even in the War Office. But the War Office system was an aggravated form of the Government Registry system, and, long before we came into existence, it had broken down under the strain-in days when every file was urgently wanted by not less than six people simultaneously. Yet, for some obscure reason, our Registry was modeled on the War Office Registry, and was, in those early days, a thorn in our sides. The men of 'Push and Go' wrote minutes in the Government style and entrusted them to the Registry, and the Registry lost them or returned them like bread cast upon the waters, and this was a cause of annoyance to the men of 'Push and Go.'

manner

But, probably, it was not so much the fault of the Registry as of the messengers who fetched and carried for them. We had boy scouts first, and they had a stronghold close to the

main door, from which they terrorized us and our visitors alike, running races along the corridors and banging doors with the precision of railway porters. If the messengers had always done what was expected of them, the transmission of papers would have been carried out as follows. A would have written his minute to B and would have dropped it into his 'out' tray, whence it would have been collected by a messenger and borne to the Registry, and noted and checked out and given to another messenger who, in due course, would have deposited it in B's tray. But we were all anxious to get on with the war and, finding that each of the above processes took time, we preferred to short-circuit the system by sending papers direct, the result being that the Registry lost all trace of their whereabouts, and in many cases the papers themselves vanished into thin air. Once, wishing to test the reliability of the messenger service, I sent a file by hand to a colleague in the adjoining room. That was three years ago, but up to the present the file, and, for aught I know, the messenger, have not been traced. Still, in a place like the Ministry, where every department or section is known by cryptic initials and changes its habitat about once a month, and rooms are numbered on a principle passing the wit of manwell, these little things will and do happen.

Our boy scouts were succeeded by girl messengers, liveried in neat brown overalls. They were less boisterous and, though their attention to the ringing of our bells was but fitful, they showed greater consideration for our comfort in bringing us coal and milk for tea. But this was all much later, when we had begun to annex the Hotel Metropole, which we did piecemeal by the method of peaceful penetration! When we wanted twenty or thirty more

rooms, our friends the Office of Works sent in half a dozen house-breakers, who promptly knocked a hole in the wall and, clearing a corridor of its furniture, proceeded to barricade all the passages and staircases communicating with the rest of the hotel. We started on the top floor, but we had eaten into two others before the building was evacuated by its lawful owners, and it was not till the early summer of 1916 that the Minister and the Parliamentary and other Secretaries took up their official residence. with us.

The millionaire's suite was allotted to the Minister, and we had heard so much of the painted ceiling and the wall paper of gold and red that it became a regular Mecca of the curious before our chief's arrival and it is to be feared that Mr. Lloyd George was rather disturbed by a belated party of girl clerks who, unaware of his installation that afternoon, hammered loudly on the locked door until driven off by a scandalized flunky.

But all these haps and mishaps occurred in the days when we were still unorganized that is to say, before we had an Establishment Department.

An Establishment Department deals with Establishment, and Establishment comprises staff and salaries and accommodation, the three most vital conditions of life in a Government Office. All these things had been dealt with in the early days somehow, but probably the methods were not governmental, and, when the civil servants began their big offensive to recapture the Ministry from the business men, they wisely set to work to establish an Establishment Department, and thereby silently but effectively got power into their hands - for even a 'captain of industry' cannot do without staff, or a room to sit in, and he who fixes