Typescript of report of speech by Lord Chorley [Robert Samuel Theodore Chorley, 1st Baron Chorley], titled 'The Role of National Service in the Modern State'.

5pp., foolscap 8vo, each on a separate leaf. Fair, on aged paper, stapled together in one corner, but with the last leaf detached. The subject is not compulsory military service but the role of the civil servant (see the conclusion, quoted below). The first paragraph reads: 'Lord Chorley said that there is a close connection between the sort of function which the machinery of government performs in any society and the civil service which is required in that society. As one who had experience both from the political and from the administrative angle he would endeavour to pick out the salient points.' On p.4: 'It would already be difficult to reconstruct the National Health Service in any radical sort of way, and in a few years time it might become almost impossible; that was one of the drawbacks of organisation upon a nation wide basis, without previous experimentation.' The conclusion reads: 'The civil servant had to realise that he was at once the leader and the servant in the modern community. In modern leadership the General plays as one of the team, and a great part of his job is to make his individual followers realise that they are a team, and to give them a proper appreciation of the objectives which the team is striving to attain. That was of paramount importance in the domestic state to which we were all committed and if we failed to bring it about we might as well see the end of the western democratic civilization for which our generation had a special responsibility.' From the Chorley papers. The document is undated, but there is a reference to 'the arrangements made between 1945-50 for running national industry', and a reference in anothe document among Chorley's papers dates the talk to 1952.