Chapter 2264 - 268: We’re All Thousand-Year Foxes Here—Why Bother Playing Liaozhai Tricks?

Phillips was the first to "launch an attack," catching Arthur off guard for a moment.

Yet this was not because Arthur was ill-prepared, but rather because this Permanent Secretary of the Home Office was being somewhat less than sporting.

Not only did he "declare war without notice," he even laid on a veritable Hongmen Banquet for Arthur, choosing his own turf as the main battlefield and not even disclosing the list of guests who would be attending tonight.

But even though Phillips had every advantage of time and place, it still could not offset the fact that Arthur’s edge in personal connections was simply too overwhelming.

As Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, Phillips’s network was of course not to be underestimated. This can be seen from his education alone: he attended Charterhouse School, then Cambridge Sussex College at University. His eldest brother had once been a Lower House Member for the Leicester constituency, and his father-in-law is none other than the current Minister of War and Colonization, Charles Grant, 1st Baron Glengall.

In terms of family background, Arthur certainly could not hope to compete, but family background is not the same as personal connections. Arthur has no brother sitting in Parliament, no father-in-law serving as a Cabinet Minister, but his own mentor not long ago received the commission as Governor of Canada and High Commissioner for North America, while his former student was crowned King of Britain just half a year ago. More importantly, in the rise of both his mentor and his student, Sir Arthur played a major and highly effective part.

What makes this even more interesting is that Phillips’s brother lost his Leicester seat in last year’s general election as a candidate of the Whig Party.

We cannot pin the loss of that seat on Arthur; the Conservative Party’s resurgence in last year’s campaign was primarily due to Sir Robert Peel’s sweeping reforms of this party of the Nobility. However, as the de facto controller of Empire Publishing Company, Sir Arthur, who likes to cut the powerful down to size and lend a hand to the weak, did indeed play a certain peripheral role in all this.

And as for Phillips’s father-in-law, Charles Grant?

Come now. Barely two months ago, the Earl of Dalmo was still raging about Grant’s colonial policy in front of Arthur; this hot-tempered Your Excellency even demanded, in talks with Viscount Melbourne, that Grant be removed from his ministerial post there and then. Within the Whig Party itself, there is no shortage of people dissatisfied with Grant either. Were it not for Viscount Melbourne’s desire to preserve party unity, if you put in a Prime Minister of somewhat stronger character, Grant would very likely have been bundled out long ago.

From this it follows that, while both Arthur and Phillips are White Hall bureaucrats with connections and background, Arthur’s network is in the ascendant, whereas Phillips’s side is plainly in decline.

If that were not the case, Phillips probably would not have bothered to go to the trouble of setting Arthur up like this. As Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, a single word of "unreliable" from him would be enough to condemn many people’s careers to death.

Unfortunately for him, Sir Arthur Hastings is not among the ranks of "many people."

Within the Home Office system, there are only two types of people whom Phillips cannot dispose of by ordinary administrative means: those whose hats are linked directly to both Houses or Buckingham Palace, and those whose boots are sunk so deep into the grassroots departments that you simply cannot pull them out.

And as bad luck would have it, Arthur fits both descriptions.

Precisely because of this, Phillips was determined to keep the problem within the framework of the Home Office.

He knew that if it came to playing tricks outside the formal arena, he would be no match for this young man with such limitless prospects.

On this point, Arthur and Phillips understood each other perfectly without needing to say it.

Arthur likewise did not wish to see the issue blown out of proportion. After all, if matters got out of hand and Parliament—always meddlesome and unable to tolerate any single department becoming too dominant—were to intervene, the variables would multiply.

If he could reach a private understanding with Phillips, that would naturally be ideal.

For to persuade the administrative machinery of the Home Office, he needed to win over only Phillips himself; to persuade Parliament, he would have to win over several hundred people.

"Mr. Chadwick." Arthur did not look at Phillips, but, like him, used force against force and focused his attention on Chadwick: "I do not believe the Home Office is questioning the overall direction of the English Poor Laws."

Chadwick’s brows remained knitted, but in view of his past rapport with Arthur, he did not immediately refute him.

"In fact," Arthur went on, "if the English Poor Laws were truly as ’hated by the public’ as some quarters claim, then given the current capacity of the policing system, it would have been impossible to maintain the present, low-intensity situation for this long."

Chadwick showed little reaction to these words, but Phillips’s brows drew together.

Arthur’s remarks were not really addressed to Chadwick, but to the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office standing there.

On the surface, Arthur was saying that disturbances in the localities were limited in intensity, but the subtext was that if unrest triggered by the English Poor Laws continued to escalate, then unless the policing system were given greater powers, it would not be able to prevent the situation from spiralling further.

"The real issue is..." Arthur shifted tack: "The more deeply a reform cuts into existing structures, the more likely it is to push the implementing tier to the very front line. And once the police are repeatedly thrust to the front line, what the policing department has to bear will no longer be merely the basic duties required by law, but the social costs generated by the reform itself. You can perhaps imagine that once these costs begin to pile up on the policing system alone, they are bound, sooner or later, to rebound in some other form. Of late, according to reports from local police stations, our rate of officer resignations has hit a new high in recent years. From the standpoint of safeguarding the new English Poor Laws, this is not a promising sign."