friend. But it is happy indeed if it chances on a judicious friend. The
persons most ready to take up that sort of business are benevolent
amateurs, very well intentioned, very grave, very respectable, but also
rather dull. Their words are good, but about the joints their arguments
are weak. They speak very well, but while they are speaking, the
decorum is so great that everybody goes away. Such a man is no match
for a couple of House of Commons gladiators. They pull what he says to
shreds. They show or say that he is wrong about his facts. Then he
rises in a fuss and must explain: but in his hurry he mistakes, and
cannot find the right paper, and becomes first hot, then confused, next
inaudible, and so sits down. Probably he leaves the House with the
notion that the defence of the department has broken down, and so the
Times announces to all the world as soon as it awakes.
Some thinkers have naturally suggested that the heads of departments
should as such have the right of speech in the House. But the system
when it has been tried has not answered. M. Guizot tells us from his
own experience that such a system is not effectual. A great popular
assembly has a corporate character; it has its own privileges,
prejudices, and notions. And one of these notions is that its own
members--the persons it sees every day--whose qualities it knows, whose
minds it can test, are those whom it can most trust. A clerk speaking
from without would be an unfamiliar object. He would be an outsider. He
would speak under suspicion; he would speak without dignity. Very often
he would speak as a victim. All the bores of the House would be upon
him. He would be put upon examination. He would have to answer
interrogatories. He would be put through the figures and
cross-questioned in detail. The whole effect of what he said would be
lost in quaestiunculae and hidden in a controversial detritus.
Again, such a person would rarely speak with great ability. He would
speak as a scribe. His habits must have been formed in the quiet of an
office: he is used to red tape, placidity, and the respect of
subordinates. Such a person will hardly ever be able to stand the
hurly-burly of a public assembly. He will lose his head--he will say
what he should not. He will get hot and red; he will feel he is a sort
of culprit. After being used to the flattering deference of deferential
subordinates, he will be pestered by fuss and confounded by invective.
He will hate the House as naturally as the House does not like him. He
will be an incompetent speaker addressing a hostile audience.
And what is more, an outside administrator addressing Parliament can
move Parliament only by the goodness of his arguments. He has no votes
to back them up with. He is sure to be at chronic war with some active
minority of assailants or others. The natural mode in which a
department is improved on great points and new points is by external
suggestion; the worse foes of a department are the plausible errors
which the most visible facts suggest, and which only half visible facts
confute. Both the good ideas and the bad ideas are sure to find
advocates first in the press and then in Parliament. Against these a
permanent clerk would have to contend by argument alone. The Minister,
the head of the Parliamentary government, will not care for him. The
Minister will say in some undress soliloquy, "These permanent 'fellows'
must look after themselves. I cannot be bothered. I have only a
majority of nine, and a very shaky majority, too. I cannot afford to
make enemies for those whom I did not appoint. They did nothing for me,
and I can do nothing for them." And if the permanent clerk come to ask
his help, he will say in decorous language, "I am sure that if the
department can evince to the satisfaction of Parliament that its past
management has been such as the public interests require, no one will
be more gratified than myself. I am not aware if it will be in my power
to attend in my place on Monday; but if I can be so fortunate, I shall
listen to your official statement with my very best attention." And so
the permanent public servant will be teased by the wits, oppressed by
the bores, and massacred by the innovators of Parliament.
The incessant tyranny of Parliament over the public offices is
prevented and can only be prevented by the appointment of a
Parliamentary head, connected by close ties with the present Ministry
and the ruling party in Parliament The Parliamentary head is a
protecting machine. He and the friends he brings stand between the
department and the busybodies and crotchet-makers of the House and the
country. So long as at any moment the policy of an office could be
altered by chance votes in either House of Parliament, there is no
security for any consistency. Our guns and our ships are not, perhaps,
very good now. But they would be much worse if any thirty or forty
advocates for this gun or that gun could make a motion in Parliament,
beat the department, and get their ships or their guns adopted. The
"Black Breech Ordnance Company" and the "Adamantine Ship Company" would
soon find representatives in Parliament, if forty or fifty members
would get the national custom for their rubbish. But this result is now
prevented by the Parliamentary head of the department. As soon as the
Opposition begins the attack, he looks up his means of defence. He
studies the subject, compiles his arguments, and builds little piles of
statistics, which he hopes will have some effect. He has his reputation
at stake, and he wishes to show that he is worth his present place, and
fit for future promotion. He is well known, perhaps liked, by the
House--at any rate the House attends to him; he is one of the regular
speakers whom they hear and heed. He is sure to be able to get himself
heard, and he is sure to make the best defence he can. And after he has
settled his speech he loiters up to the Secretary of the Treasury, and
says quietly, "They have got a motion against me on Tuesday, you know.
I hope you will have your men here. A lot of fellows have crotchets,
and though they do not agree a bit with one another, they are all
against the department; they will all vote for the inquiry." And the
Secretary answers, "Tuesday, you say; no (looking at a paper), I do not
think it will come on Tuesday. There is Higgins on Education. He is
good for a long time. But anyhow it shall be all right." And then he
glides about and speaks a word here and a word there, in consequence of
which, when the anti-official motion is made, a considerable array of
steady, grave faces sits behind the Treasury Bench--nay, possibly a
rising man who sits in outlying independence below the gangway rises to
defend the transaction; the department wins by thirty-three, and the
management of that business pursues its steady way.
This contrast is no fancy picture. The experiment of conducting the
administration of a public department by an independent unsheltered
authority has often been tried, and always failed. Parliament always
poked at it, till it made it impossible. The most remarkable is that of
the Poor Law. The administration of that law is not now very good, but
it is not too much to say that almost the whole of its goodness has
been preserved by its having an official and party protector in the
House of Commons. Without that contrivance we should have drifted back
into the errors of the old Poor Law, and superadded to them the present
meanness and incompetence in our large towns. All would have been given
up to local management. Parliament would have interfered with the
central board till it made it impotent, and the local authorities would
have been despotic. The first administration of the new Poor Law was by
"Commissioners"--the three kings of Somerset House, as they were
called. The system was certainly not tried in untrustworthy hands. At
the crisis Mr. Chadwick, one of the most active and best administrators
in England, was the secretary and the motive power: the principal
Commissioner was Sir George Lewis, perhaps the best selective
administrator of our time. But the House of Commons would not let the
Commission alone. For a long time it was defended because the Whigs had
made the Commission, and felt bound as a party to protect it. The new
law started upon a certain intellectual impetus, and till that was
spent its administration was supported in a rickety existence by an
abnormal strength. But afterwards the Commissioners were left to their
intrinsic weakness. There were members for all the localities, but
there were none for them. There were members for every crotchet and
corrupt interest, but there were none for them. The rural guardians
would have liked to eke out wages by rates; the city guardians hated
control, and hated to spend money. The Commission had to be dissolved,
and a Parliamentary head was added; the result is not perfect, but it
is an amazing improvement on what would have happened in the old
system. The new system has not worked well because the central
authority has too little power; but under the previous system the
central authority was getting to have, and by this time would have had,
no power at all. And if Sir George Lewis and Mr. Chadwick could not
maintain an outlying department in the face of Parliament, how unlikely
that an inferior compound of discretion and activity will ever maintain
it!
These reasonings show why a changing Parliamentary head, a head
changing as the Ministry changes, is a necessity of good Parliamentary
government, and there is happily a natural provision that there will be
such heads. Party organisation ensures it. In America, where on account
of the fixedly recurring presidential election, and the perpetual minor
elections, party organisation is much more effectually organised than
anywhere else, the effect on the offices is tremendous. Every office is
filled anew at every presidential change, at least every change which
brings in a new party. Not only the greatest posts, as in England, but
the minor posts change their occupants. The scale of the financial
operations of the Federal government is now so increased that most
likely in that department, at least, there must in future remain a
permanent element of great efficiency; a revenue of 90,000,000 pounds
sterling cannot be collected and expended with a trifling and changing
staff. But till now the Americans have tried to get on not only with
changing heads to a bureaucracy, as the English, but without any stable
bureaucracy at all. They have facilities for trying it which no one
else has. All Americans can administer, and the number of them really
fit to be in succession lawyers, financiers, or military managers is
wonderful; they need not be as afraid of a change of all their
officials as European countries must, for the incoming substitutes are
sure to be much better there than here; and they do not fear, as we
English fear, that the outgoing officials will be left destitute in
middle life, with no hope for the future and no recompense for the
past, for in America (whatever may be the cause of it) opportunities
are numberless, and a man who is ruined by being "off the rails" in
England soon there gets on another line. The Americans will probably to
some extent modify their past system of total administrative
cataclysms, but their very existence in the only competing form of free
government should prepare us for and make us patient with the mild
transitions of Parliamentary government.
These arguments will, I think, seem conclusive to almost every one;
but, at this moment, many people will meet them thus: they will say,
"You prove what we do not deny, that this system of periodical change
is a necessary ingredient in Parliamentary government, but you have not
proved what we do deny, that this change is a good thing. Parliamentary
government may have that effect, among others, for anything we care: we
maintain merely that it is a defect." In answer, I think it may be
shown not, indeed, that this precise change is necessary to a
permanently perfect administration, but that some analogous change,
some change of the same species, is so.
At this moment, in England, there is a sort of leaning towards
bureaucracy--at least, among writers and talkers. There is a seizure of
partiality to it. The English people do not easily change their rooted
notions, but they have many unrooted notions. Any great European event
is sure for a moment to excite a sort of twinge of conversion to
something or other. Just now, the triumph of the Prussians--the
bureaucratic people, as is believed, par excellence--has excited a kind
of admiration for bureaucracy, which a few years since we should have
thought impossible. I do not presume to criticise the Prussian
bureaucracy of my own knowledge; it certainly is not a pleasant
institution for foreigners to come across, though agreeableness to
travellers is but of very second-rate importance. But it is quite
certain that the Prussian bureaucracy, though we, for a moment, half
admire it at a distance, does not permanently please the most
intelligent and liberal Prussians at home. What are two among the
principal aims of the Fortschritt Partei--the party of progress--as Mr.
Grant Duff, the most accurate and philosophical of our describers,
delineates them?
First, "a liberal system, conscientiously carried out in all the
details of the administration, with a view to avoiding the scandals now
of frequent occurrence, when an obstinate or bigoted official sets at
defiance the liberal initiations of the Government, trusting to
backstairs influence".
Second, "an easy method of bringing to justice guilty officials, who
are at present, as in France, in all conflicts with simple citizens,
like men armed cap-a-pie fighting with defenceless". A system against
which the most intelligent native liberals bring even with colour of
reason such grave objections, is a dangerous model for foreign
imitation.
The defects of bureaucracy are, indeed, well known. It is a form of
Government which has been tried often enough in the world, and it is
easy to show what, human nature being what it in the long run is, the
defects of a bureaucracy must in the long run be.
It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine
than for results; or, as Burke put it, "that they will think the
substance of business not to be much more important than the forms of
it". Their whole education and all the habit of their lives make them
do so. They are brought young into the particular part of the public
service to which they are attached; they are occupied for years in
learning its forms--afterwards, for years too, in applying these forms
to trifling matters. They are, to use the phrase of an old writer, "but
the tailors of business; they cut the clothes, but they do not find the
body". Men so trained must come to think the routine of business not a
means, but an end--to imagine the elaborate machinery of which they
form a part, and from which they derive their dignity, to be a grand
and achieved result, not a working and changeable instrument. But in a
miscellaneous world, there is now one evil and now another. The very
means which best helped you yesterday, may very likely be those which
most impede you to-morrow--you may want to do a different thing
to-morrow, and all your accumulation of means for yesterday's work is
but an obstacle to the new work. The Prussian military system is the
theme of popular wonder now, yet it sixty years pointed the moral
against form. We have all heard the saying that "Frederic the Great
lost the battle of Jena". It was the system which he had established--a
good system for his wants and his times--which, blindly adhered to, and
continued into a different age, put to strive with new competitors,
brought his country to ruin. The "dead and formal" Prussian system was
then contrasted with the "living" French system--the sudden outcome of
the new explosive democracy. The system which now exists is the product
of the reaction; and the history of its predecessor is a warning what
its future history may be too. It is not more celebrated for its day
than Frederic's for his, and principle teaches that a bureaucracy,
elated by sudden success, and marvelling at its own merit, is the most
unimproving and shallow of Governments.
Not only does a bureaucracy thus tend to under-government, in point of
quality; it tends to over-government, in point of quantity. The trained
official hates the rude, untrained public. He thinks that they are
stupid, ignorant, reckless--that they cannot tell their own
interest--that they should have the leave of the office before they do
anything. Protection is the natural inborn creed of every official
body; free trade is an extrinsic idea alien to its notions, and hardly
to be assimilated with life; and it is easy to see how an accomplished
critic, used to a free and active life, could thus describe the
official.
"Every imaginable and real social interest," says Mr. Laing, "religion,
education, law, police, every branch of public or private business,
personal liberty to move from place to place, even from parish to
parish within the same jurisdiction; liberty to engage in any branch of
trade or industry, on a small or large scale, all the objects, in
short, in which body, mind, and capital can be employed in civilised
society, were gradually laid hold of for the employment and support of
functionaries, were centralised in bureaux, were superintended,
licensed, inspected, reported upon, and interfered with by a host of
officials scattered over the land, and maintained at the public
expense, yet with no conceivable utility in their duties. They are not,
however, gentlemen at large, enjoying salary without service. They are
under a semi-military discipline. In Bavaria, for instance, the
superior civil functionary can place his inferior functionary under
house-arrest, for neglect of duty, or other offence against civil
functionary discipline. In Wurtemberg, the functionary cannot marry
without leave from his superior. Voltaire says, somewhere, that, 'the
art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly
can pay for the benefit of the other third'. This is realised in
Germany by the functionary system. The functionaries are not there for
the benefit of the people, but the people for the benefit of the
functionaries. All this machinery of functionarism, with its numerous
ranks and gradations in every district, filled with a staff of clerks
and expectants in every department looking for employment,
appointments, or promotions, was intended to be a new support of the
throne in the new social state of the Continent; a third class, in
connection with the people by their various official duties of
interference in all public or private affairs, yet attached by their
interests to the kingly power. The Beamptenstand, or functionary class,
was to be the equivalent to the class of nobility, gentry, capitalists,
and men of larger landed property than the peasant-proprietors, and was
to make up in numbers for the want of individual weight and influence.
In France, at the expulsion of Louis Philippe, the civil functionaries
were stated to amount to 807,030 individuals. This civil army was more
than double of the military. In Germany, this class is necessarily more
numerous in proportion to the population, the landwehr system imposing
many more restrictions than the conscription on the free action of the
people, and requiring more officials to manage it, and the semi-feudal
jurisdictions and forms of law requiring much more writing and
intricate forms of procedure before the courts than the Code Napoleon."
A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official
power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave
free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government,
as well as impairs its quality.
The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy--a bureaucracy trained from
early life to its special avocation--is, though it boasts of an
appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of
the art of business. That art has not yet been condensed into precepts,
but a great many experiments have been made, and a vast floating vapour
of knowledge floats through society. One of the most sure principles
is, that success depends on a due mixture of special and non-special
minds--of minds which attend to the means, and of minds which attend to
the end. The success of the great joint-stock banks of London--the most
remarkable achievement of recent business--has been an example of the
use of this mixture. These banks are managed by a board of persons
mostly NOT trained to the business, supplemented by, and annexed to, a
body of specially trained officers, who have been bred to banking all
their lives. These mixed banks have quite beaten the old banks,
composed exclusively of pure bankers; it is found that the board of
directors has greater and more flexible knowledge--more insight into
the wants of a commercial community--knows when to lend and when not to
lend, better than the old bankers, who had never looked at life, except
out of the bank windows. Just so the most successful railways in Europe
have been conducted--not by engineers or traffic managers--but by
capitalists; by men of a certain business culture, if of no other.
These capitalists buy and use the services of skilled managers, as the
unlearned attorney buys and uses the services of the skilled barrister,
and manage far better than any of the different sorts of special men
under them. They combine these different specialities--make it clear
where the realm of one ends and that of the other begins, and add to it
a wide knowledge of large affairs, which no special man can have, and
which is only gained by diversified action. But this utility of leading
minds used to generalise, and acting upon various materials, is
entirely dependent upon their position. They must not be at the
bottom--they must not even be half way up--they must be at the top. A
merchant's clerk would be a child at a bank counter; but the merchant
himself could, very likely, give good, clear, and useful advice in a
bank court. The merchant's clerk would be equally at sea in a railway
office, but the merchant himself could give good advice, very likely,
at a board of directors. The summits (if I may so say) of the various
kinds of business are, like the tops of mountains, much more alike than
the parts below--the bare principles are much the same; it is only the
rich variegated details of the lower strata that so contrast with one
another. But it needs travelling to know that the summits ARE the same.
Those who live on one mountain believe that THEIR mountain is wholly
unlike all others.
The application of this principle to Parliamentary government is very
plain; it shows at once that the intrusion from without upon an office
of an exterior head of the office, is not an evil, but that, on the
contrary, it is essential to the perfection of that office. If it is
left to itself, the office will become technical, self-absorbed,
self-multiplying. It will be likely to overlook the end in the means;
it will fail from narrowness of mind; it will be eager in seeming to
do; it will be idle in real doing. An extrinsic chief is the fit
corrector of such errors. He can say to the permanent chief, skilled in
the forms and pompous with the memories of his office, "Will you, Sir,
explain to me how this regulation conduces to the end in view?
According to the natural view of things, the applicant should state the
whole of his wishes to one clerk on one paper; you make him say it to
five clerks on five papers." Or, again, "Does it not appear to you,
Sir, that the reason of this formality is extinct? When we were
building wood ships, it was quite right to have such precautions
against fire; but now that we are building iron ships," etc., etc. If a
junior clerk asked these questions, he would be "pooh-poohed!" It is
only the head of an office that can get them answered. It is he, and he
only, that brings the rubbish of office to the burning-glass of sense.