RESPONSIBILITY OF THE STATE IN ENGLAND 461 of government is shown, is, in fact, most serious. A state, in brief, the officials of which can act without the proof of reasonableness inherent in the methods of their poHcy, has gone far to destroy the notion which hes at the basis of law. This recent development has, indeed, a history that goes back to the tendency of the official to show deep dissatisfaction with the slow-moving methods of the law. The technicalities of the Merchant Shipping Act, for instance, actually operate, so we are told,^^ to make its provisions for detaining unseaworthy ships substantially null and void. Effort has in recent years been made to free the administrative process from the hampering influence of the rule of law. Where, a generation ago, Parliament laid down with strict minuteness the conditions of taxation, to-day the Board of Customs and Excise has practically legislative pow- gj-g 82 "Wise men," said Sir Henry Taylor in a remarkable sen- tence,^ "have always perceived that the execution of political measures is in reality the essence of them"; and it is this which makes so urgent the rigorous regard of executive practice. In the stress of conflict, perhaps, cases like R. v. Halliday ^* may be pardoned; though it is well even there to consider whether the end the means is to serve may not be lost sight of in the means a narrow expediency seems to dictate.^ But a far wider problem is set in the Arlidge case.^® For here, in fact, not only is the court excluded from the consideration of an administrative decision, but the tests of judicial procedure which have been proved by ex- perience are excluded without means at hand to force their en- trance. What, broadly, the Arlidge case means is that a handful of officials will, without hindrance from the courts, decide in their own fashion what method of application an Act of Parlia- ment is to have. And where the state that is acting through their agency is an irresponsible state, we have in fact a return to those primitive methods of justice traditionally associated with the rough efficiency of the Tudor age,^^ '• Dicey, Law of the Constitution, 8 ed., 393.
- Fourth Report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service (1914), Cd. 7338, 28.
- The Statesman, 89.
" [1917] A. C. 260. «* Cf. Lord Shaw's dissent in Rex v. Halliday, supra. » [1915] A. C. 120. ^ Cf. Poimd, Address to the New Hampshire Bar Association, Jime 30, 191 7.
