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 parlia mentary 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 organization

insures it. In America, where, on account of the fixedly recurring presidential election and the perpetual minor elections, party organization is much more effectually organized 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 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 [do] 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 criticize the Prussian bureaucracy of my own knowledge: it certainly is not a pleasant institution for foreigners to come across, though agreeableness to travelers 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 back-stairs 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 capà-pie fighting with the defenseless."*

A system against which the most intelligent native liberals bring, even with color 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,

*"Studies in European Politics," section "Prussia."

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 marveling 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 overgovernment 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 [its] 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 civilized society, were gradually laid hold of for the employment and support of functionaries, were centralized in bureaux, were VOL. IV.-14