YOU hear complaints all the time that we lack practical people;
there are plenty of politicians for instance; plenty of generals too;
nowadays directors of all sorts can be found in any quantity you
like--but there are no practical people. At least that's the
complaint. It's even said that on some railways you can't find
decent staff; the story goes that it's impossible for some
steamship line to recruit passable administrative personnel. One
day you hear of trains colliding or bridges collapsing on some
newly-opened line; the next they're writing about a train
practically stuck in a snow-drift for the winter; it travelled a few
hours and stood in the snow for five days. In one place they tell
you there are hundreds of tons of produce rotting while they wait
for dispatch, in another you hear (though it's hard to credit) that
a railway administrator, some inspector that is, has administered
a punch on the nose to some merchant's clerk who was pestering
him about the dispatch of his goods, explaining his administrative
action on the grounds that he had 'got a little heated'. It's
terrifying to think how many civil servants there apparently are;
everyone's been in the civil service, or is in it now, or intends to
be--how can it come about that a decent administrative staff for a
steamship line can't be put together out of this kind of material?

The answer sometimes given to this question is a very simple
one, so simple it's hard to credit. It's true, say they, that everyone
in the country is, or has been, in the service and that this has been
going on for two hundred years, on the best German pattern,
from grandfather to grandson; the trouble is that civil servants
are the least practical folk you can find, and things have got to the
stage where abstract knowledge, divorced from practice, has
been, until quite recently, regarded even by civil servants

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