But he was not certain of the view his department would take.

A department is to those it employs a complex personality with ideas and even fads of its own.

It depends on the loyal devotion of its servants, and the devoted loyalty of trusted servants is associated with a certain amount of affectionate contempt, which keeps it sweet, as it were.

By a benevolent provision of Nature no man is a hero to his valet, or else the heroes would have to brush their own clothes.
Likewise no department appears perfectly wise to the intimacy of its workers.

A department does not know so much as some of its servants.
Being a dispassionate organism, it can never be perfectly informed.