Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 152, March 14, 1917

Excerpt

A NATIONAL SKY-SCRAPER.

I have been often asked why the Government, foreseeing the inevitable increase of Departments, had not the elementary imagination to build a colossal sky-scraper to accommodate them all.

The objections to such an act of apparently obvious intelligence may be briefly enumerated.

(1) With such a landmark whoever had business to conduct with a Government Department would know where to find it, for which reason alone the system of huts and hotels is to be preferred. The hotels are widely scattered and the huts hidden away in odd corners of public gardens and parks, and even in the bed of a lake. By the use of motor-cars (petrol being for official and not for private consumption) such co-operation as cannot be avoided between Departments is assured.

(2) Even in a single Department too close co-operation is not desirable. An hotel, divided into hundreds of small rooms and flats, enables the occupant of each room to be isolated, and each self-contained flat to have almost the status of a sub-department. Thus the vexatious supervision, the easy intercourse and rapid decision which are so disturbing to official routine are avoided.

(3) The express elevators, by which the visitor is shot up to the higher storeys of a sky-scraper, would suggest a certain directness and celerity in official methods that is calculated to arouse false hopes.

(4) With many or all Departments in one building there would be the temptation to place the entire clerical staff under Mr. Neville Chamberlain as Director-General, who would transfer them from one office to another according to the necessities of each day's work. Such mobility would be unpopular, while the inevitable creation of a central Press-Bureau, Publicity and Information Department would afford the Press a satisfaction that it has done nothing to deserve.

(5) On the top floor of a sky-scraper is usually a luncheon-club; here the various Ministers would meet daily, and could only with difficulty escape the exchange of ideas.

(6) If all Government offices were in a single building the PRIME MINISTER could make daily visits to each, and would find it hard to avoid comparison between the organization and methods of his various Ministers.

These considerations alone finally dispose of any merits which the plan for a national sky-scraper may seem superficially to possess.

"SCRUTATOR TEMPORIS ACTI."—You are not the only one who holds that Parliament could not be better or more patriotically occupied at the present stage of the War than in devoting their energies to a discussion of the Report of the Dardanelles Commission and the detailed evidence on which it was based. We understand that your view is shared by all the keenest patriots among the Central Powers.

"TUBER CAIN."—The earliest poet to sing of rationing was WILLIAM MORRIS, who repeatedly described himself as "The idle singer of an empty day."

"A LOVER OF 'BUSTER BROWN.'"—We gladly gave publicity to your indignant denial of any tribal relationship between "Buster Brown" and Filibuster STONE.