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. What he did
with his stored knowledge only the Secretary knew; and he, naturally, would not
publish the news abroad. This man's name was Wressley, and it was the
Shibboleth, in those days, to say:--"Wressley knows more about the Central
Indian States than any living man.
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