They do their work,
and grow to think that there is nothing but their work, and nothing
like their work, and that they are the real pivots on which the
administration turns. Here is an instance of this feeling. A half-
caste clerk was ruling forms in a Pay Office. He said to me:--"Do
you know what would happen if I added or took away one single line
on this sheet?" Then, with the air of a conspirator:--"It would
disorganize the whole of the Treasury payments throughout the whole
of the Presidency Circle! Think of that?"
If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own
particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill
themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the
listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin.
Even the Secretariat believes that it does good when it asks an
over-driven Executive Officer to take census of wheat-weevils
through a district of five thousand square miles.
There was a man once in the Foreign Office--a man who had grown
middle-aged in the department, and was commonly said, by irreverent
juniors, to be able to repeat Aitchison's "Treaties and Sunnuds"
backwards, in his sleep.
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