2014년 12월 28일 일요일

The English Constitution 8

The English Constitution 8

Subject therefore to the two minor, but still not inconsiderable,
defects I have named, Parliament conforms itself accurately enough,
both as a chooser of executives and as a legislature, to the formed
opinion of the country. Similarly, and subject to the same exceptions,
it expresses the nation's opinion in words well, when it happens that
words, not laws, are wanted. On foreign matters, where we cannot
legislate, whatever the English nation thinks, or thinks it thinks, as
to the critical events of the world, whether in Denmark, in Italy, or
America, and no matter whether it thinks wisely or unwisely, that same
something, wise or unwise, will be thoroughly well said in Parliament.
The lyrical function of Parliament, if I may use such a phrase, is well
done; it pours out in characteristic words the characteristic heart of
the nation. And it can do little more useful. Now that free government
is in Europe so rare and in America so distant, the opinion, even the
incomplete, erroneous, rapid opinion of the free English people is
invaluable. It may be very wrong, but it is sure to be unique; and if
it is right it is sure to contain matter of great magnitude, for it is
only a first-class matter in distant things which a free people ever
sees or learns. The English people must miss a thousand minutiae that
continental bureaucracies know even too well; but if they see a
cardinal truth which those bureaucracies miss, that cardinal truth may
greatly help the world.

But if in these ways, and subject to these exceptions, Parliament by
its policy and its speech well embodies and expresses public opinion, I
own I think it must be conceded that it is not equally successful in
elevating public opinion. The teaching task of Parliament is the task
it does worst. Probably at this moment, it is natural to exaggerate
this defect. The greatest teacher of all in Parliament, the head-master
of the nation, the great elevator of the country--so far as Parliament
elevates it--must be the Prime Minister: he has an influence, an
authority, a facility in giving a great tone to discussion, or a mean
tone, which no other man has. Now Lord Palmerston for many years
steadily applied his mind to giving, not indeed a mean tone, but a
light tone, to the proceedings of Parliament. One of his greatest
admirers has since his death told a story of which he scarcely sees, or
seems to see, the full effect. When Lord Palmerston was first made
leader of the House, his jaunty manner was not at all popular, and some
predicted failure. "No," said an old member, "he will soon educate us
DOWN to his level; the House will soon prefer this Ha! Ha! style to the
wit of Canning and the gravity of Peel." I am afraid that we must own
that the prophecy was accomplished. No Prime Minister, so popular and
so influential, has ever left in the public memory so little noble
teaching. Twenty years hence, when men inquire as to the then fading
memory of Palmerston, we shall be able to point to no great truth which
he taught, no great distinct policy which he embodied, no noble words
which once fascinated his age, and which, in after years, men would not
willingly let die. But we shall be able to say "he had a genial manner,
a firm, sound sense; he had a kind of cant of insincerity, but we
always knew what he meant; he had the brain of a ruler in the clothes
of a man of fashion". Posterity will hardly understand the words of the
aged reminiscent, but we now feel their effect. The House of Commons,
since it caught its tone from such a statesman, has taught the nation
worse, and elevated it less, than usual.

I think, however, that a correct observer would decide that in general,
and on principle, the House of Commons does not teach the public as
much as it might teach it, or as the public would wish to learn. I do
not wish very abstract, very philosophical, very hard matters to be
stated in Parliament. The teaching there given must be popular, and to
be popular it must be concrete, embodied, short. The problem is to know
the highest truth which the people will bear, and to inculcate and
preach that. Certainly Lord Palmerston did not preach it. He a little
degraded us by preaching a doctrine just below our own standard--a
doctrine not enough below us to repel us much, but yet enough below to
harm us by augmenting a worldliness which needed no addition, and by
diminishing a love of principle and philosophy which did not want
deduction.

In comparison with the debates of any other assembly, it is true the
debates by the English Parliament are most instructive. The debates in
the American Congress have little teaching efficacy; it is the
characteristic vice of Presidential government to deprive them of that
efficacy; in that government a debate in the legislature has little
effect, for it cannot turn out the executive, and the executive can
veto all it decides. The French Chambers[7] are suitable appendages to
an Empire which desires the power of despotism without its shame; they
prevent the enemies of the Empire being quite correct when they say
there is no free speech; a few permitted objectors fill the air with
eloquence, which every one knows to be often true, and always vain. The
debates in an English Parliament fill a space in the world which, in
these auxiliary chambers, is not possible. But I think any one who
compares the discussions on great questions in the higher part of the
press, with the discussions in Parliament, will feel that there is (of
course amid much exaggeration and vague ness) a greater vigour and a
higher meaning in the writing than in the speech: a vigour which the
public appreciate--a meaning that they like to hear.


[7] This of course relates to the assemblies of the Empire.


The Saturday Review said, some years since, that the ability of
Parliament was a "protected ability": that there was at the door a
differential duty of at least 2000 pounds a year. Accordingly the House
of Commons, representing only mind coupled with property, is not equal
in mind to a legislature chosen for mind only, and whether accompanied
by wealth or not. But I do not for a moment wish to see a
representation of pure mind; it would be contrary to the main thesis of
this essay. I maintain that Parliament ought to embody the public
opinion of the English nation; and, certainly, that opinion is much
more fixed by its property than by its mind. The "too clever by half"
people who live in "Bohemia," ought to have no more influence in
Parliament than they have in England, and they can scarcely have less.
Only, after every great abatement and deduction, I think the country
would bear a little more mind; and that there is a profusion of opulent
dulness in Parliament which might a little--though only a little--be
pruned away.

The only function of Parliament which remains to be considered is the
informing function, as I just now called it; the function which belongs
to it, or to members of it, to bring before the nation the ideas,
grievances, and wishes of special classes. This must not be confounded
with what I have called its teaching function. In life, no doubt, the
two run one into another. But so do many things which it is very
important in definition to separate. The facts of two things being
often found together is rather a reason for, than an objection to,
separating them, in idea. Sometimes they are NOT found together, and
then we may be puzzled if we have not trained ourselves to separate
them. The teaching function brings true ideas before the nation, and is
the function of its highest minds. The expressive function brings only
special ideas, and is the function of but special minds. Each class has
its ideas, wants, and notions; and certain brains are ingrained with
them. Such sectarian conceptions are not those by which a determining
nation should regulate its action, nor are orators, mainly animated by
such conceptions, safe guides in policy. But those orators should be
heard; those conceptions should be kept in sight. The great maxim of
modern thought is not only the toleration of everything, but the
examination of everything. It is by examining very bare, very dull,
very unpromising things, that modern science has come to be what it is.
There is a story of a great chemist who said he owed half his fame to
his habit of examining after his experiments, what was going to be
thrown away: everybody knew the result of the experiment itself, but in
the refuse matter there were many little facts and unknown changes,
which suggested the discoveries of a famous life to a person capable of
looking for them. So with the special notions of neglected classes.
They may contain elements of truth which, though small, are the very
elements which we now require, because we already know all the rest.

This doctrine was well known to our ancestors. They laboured to give a
CHARACTER to the various constituencies, or to many of them. They
wished that the shipping trade, the wool trade, the linen trade, should
each have their spokesman; that the unsectional Parliament should know
what each section in the nation thought before it gave the national
decision. This is the true reason for admitting the working classes to
a share in the representation, at least as far as the composition of
Parliament is to be improved by that admission. A great many ideas, a
great many feelings have gathered among the town artisans--a peculiar
intellectual life has sprung up among them. They believe that they have
interests which are misconceived or neglected; that they know something
which others do not know; that the thoughts of Parliament are not as
their thoughts. They ought to be allowed to try to convince Parliament;
their notions ought to be stated as those of other classes are stated;
their advocates should be heard as other people's advocates are heard.
Before the Reform Bill, there was a recognised machinery for that
purpose. The member for Westminster, and other members, were elected by
universal suffrage (or what was in substance such); those members did,
in their day, state what were the grievances and ideas--or were thought
to be the grievances and ideas--of the working classes. It was the
single, unbending franchise introduced in 1832 that has caused this
difficulty, as it has others.

Until such a change is made the House of Commons will be defective,
just as the House of Lords was defective. It will not LOOK right. As
long as the Lords do not come to their own House, we may prove on paper
that it is a good revising chamber, but it will be difficult to make
the literary argument felt. Just so, as long as a great class,
congregated in political localities, and known to have political
thoughts and wishes, is without notorious and palpable advocates in
Parliament, we may prove on paper that our representation is adequate,
but the world will not believe it. There is a saying in the eighteenth
century, that in politics, "gross appearances are great realities". It
is in vain to demonstrate that the working classes have no grievances;
that the middle classes have done all that is possible for them, and so
on with a crowd of arguments which I need not repeat, for the
newspapers keep them in type, and we can say them by heart. But so long
as the "gross appearance" is that there are no evident, incessant
representatives to speak the wants of artisans, the "great reality"
will be a diffused dissatisfaction. Thirty years ago it was vain to
prove that Gatton and Old Sarum were valuable seats, and sent good
members. Everybody said, "Why, there are no people there". Just so
everybody must say now, "Our representative system must be imperfect,
for an immense class has no members to speak for it". The only answer
to the cry against constituencies WITHOUT inhabitants was to transfer
their power to constituencies WITH inhabitants. Just so, the way to
stop the complaint that artisans have no members is to give them
members--to create a body of representatives, chosen by artisans,
believing, as Mr. Carlyle would say, "that artisanism is the one thing
needful".




NO. VI.

ON CHANGES OF MINISTRY.


There is one error as to the English Constitution which crops up
periodically. Circumstances which often, though irregularly, occur
naturally suggests that error, and as surely as they happen it revives.
The relation of Parliament, and especially of the House of Commons, to
the executive Government is the specific peculiarity of our
Constitution, and an event which frequently happens much puzzles some
people as to it.

That event is a change of Ministry. All our administrators go out
together. The whole executive Government changes--at least, all the
heads of it change in a body, and at every such change some speculators
are sure to exclaim that such a habit is foolish. They say: "No doubt
Mr. Gladstone and Lord Russell may have been wrong about Reform; no
doubt Mr. Gladstone may have been cross in the House of Commons; but
why should either or both of these events change all the heads of all
our practical departments? What could be more absurd than what happened
in 1858? Lord Palmerston was for once in his life over-buoyant; he gave
rude answers to stupid inquiries; he brought into the Cabinet a
nobleman concerned in an ugly trial about a woman; he, or his Foreign
Secretary, did not answer a French despatch by a despatch, but told our
ambassador to reply orally. And because of these trifles, or at any
rate these isolated UNadministrative mistakes, all our administration
had fresh heads. The Poor Law Board had a new chief, the Home
Department a new chief, the Public Works a new chief. Surely this was
absurd." Now, is this objection good or bad? Speaking generally, is it
wise so to change all our rulers?

The practice produces three great evils. First, it brings in on a
sudden new persons and untried persons to preside over our policy. A
little while ago Lord Cranborne[8] had no more idea that he would now
be Indian Secretary than that he would be a bill broker. He had never
given any attention to Indian affairs; he can get them up, because he
is an able educated man who can get up anything. But they are not "part
and parcel" of his mind; not his subjects of familiar reflection, nor
things of which he thinks by predilection, of which he cannot help
thinking. But because Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone did not please the
House of Commons about Reform, there he is. A perfectly inexperienced
man, so far as Indian affairs go, rules all our Indian Empire. And if
all our heads of offices change together, so very frequently it must
be. If twenty offices are vacant at once, there are almost never twenty
tried, competent, clever men ready to take them. The difficulty of
making up a Government is very much like the difficulty of putting
together a Chinese puzzle: the spaces do not suit what you have to put
into them. And the difficulty of matching a Ministry is more than that
of fitting a puzzle, because the Ministers to be put in can object,
though the bits of a puzzle cannot. One objector can throw out the
combination. In 1847 Lord Grey would not join Lord John Russell's
projected Government if Lord Palmerston was to be Foreign Secretary;
Lord Palmerston WOULD be Foreign Secretary, and so the Government was
not formed. The cases in which a single refusal prevents a Government
are rare, and there must be many concurrent circumstances to make it
effectual. But the cases in which refusals impair or spoil a Government
are very common. It almost never happens that the Ministry-maker can
put into his offices exactly whom he would like; a number of placemen
are always too proud, too eager, or too obstinate to go just where they
should.


[8] Now Lord Salisbury, who, when this was written, was Indian
Secretary.--Note to second edition.


Again, this system not only makes new Ministers ignorant, but keeps
present Ministers indifferent. A man cannot feel the same interest that
he might in his work if he knows that by events over which he has no
control, by errors in which he had no share, by metamorphoses of
opinion which belong to a different sequence of phenomena, he may have
to leave that work in the middle, and may very likely never return to
it. The new man put into a fresh office ought to have the best motive
to learn his task thoroughly, but, in fact, in England, he has not at
all the best motive. The last wave of party and politics brought him
there, the next may take him away. Young and eager men take, even at
this disadvantage, a keen interest in office work, but most men,
especially old men, hardly do so. Many a battered Minister may be seen
to think much more of the vicissitudes which make him and unmake him,
than of any office matter.

Lastly, a sudden change of Ministers may easily cause a mischievous
change of policy. In many matters of business, perhaps in most, a
continuity of mediocrity is better than a hotch-potch of excellences.
For example, now that progress in the scientific arts is
revolutionising the instruments of war, rapid changes in our
head-preparers for land and sea war are most costly and most hurtful. A
single competent selector of new inventions would probably in the
course of years, after some experience, arrive at something tolerable;
it is in the nature of steady, regular, experimenting ability to
diminish, if not vanquish, such difficulties. But a quick succession of
chiefs has no similar facility. They do not learn from each other's
experience;--you might as well expect the new head boy at a public
school to learn from the experience of the last head boy. The most
valuable result of many years is a nicely balanced mind instinctively
heedful of various errors; but such a mind is the incommunicable gift
of individual experience, and an outgoing Minister can no more leave it
to his successor, than an elder brother can pass it on to a younger.
Thus a desultory and incalculable policy may follow from a rapid change
of Ministers.

These are formidable arguments, but four things may, I think, be said
in reply to, or mitigation of them. A little examination will show that
this change of Ministers is essential to a Parliamentary government;
that something like it will happen in all elective Governments, and
that worse happens under Presidential government; that it is not
necessarily prejudicial to a good administration, but that, on the
contrary, something like it is a prerequisite of good administration;
that the evident evils of English administration are not the results of
Parliamentary government, but of grave deficiencies in other parts of
our political and social state; that, in a word, they result not from
what we have, but from what we have NOT.

As to the first point, those who wish to remove the choice of Ministers
from Parliament have not adequately considered what a Parliament is. A
Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle
people. In proportion as you give it power it will inquire into
everything, settle everything, meddle in everything. In an ordinary
despotism, the powers of a despot are limited by his bodily capacity,
and by the calls of pleasure; he is but one man; there are but twelve
hours in his day, and he is not disposed to employ more than a small
part in dull business; he keeps the rest for the court, or the harem,
or for society. He is at the top of the world, and all the pleasures of
the world are set before him. Mostly there is only a very small part of
political business which he cares to understand, and much of it (with
the shrewd sensual sense belonging to the race) he knows that he will
never understand. But a Parliament is composed of a great number of men
by no means at the top of the world. When you establish a predominant
Parliament, you give over the rule of the country to a despot who has
unlimited time--who has unlimited vanity--who has, or believes he has,
unlimited comprehension, whose pleasure is in action, whose life is
work. There is no limit to the curiosity of Parliament. Sir Robert Peel
once suggested that a list should be taken down of the questions asked
of him in a single evening; they touched more or less on fifty
subjects, and there were a thousand other subjects which by parity of
reason might have been added too. As soon as bore A ends, bore B
begins. Some inquire from genuine love of knowledge, or from a real
wish to improve what they ask about; others to see their name in the
papers; others to show a watchful constituency that they are alert;
others to get on and to get a place in the Government; others from an
accumulation of little motives they could not themselves analyse, or
because it is their habit to ask things. And a proper reply must be
given. It was said that "Darby Griffith destroyed Lord Palmerston's
first Government," and undoubtedly the cheerful impertinence with which
in the conceit of victory that Minister answered grave men much hurt
his Parliamentary power. There is one thing which no one will permit to
be treated lightly--himself. And so there is one too which a sovereign
assembly will never permit to be lessened or ridiculed--its own power.
The Minister of the day will have to give an account in Parliament of
all branches of administration, to say why they act when they do, and
why they do not when they don't.

Nor is chance inquiry all a public department has most to fear. Fifty
members of Parliament may be zealous for a particular policy affecting
the department, and fifty others for another policy, and between them
they may divide its action, spoil its favourite aims, and prevent its
consistently working out either of their own aims. The process is very
simple. Every department at times looks as if it was in a scrape; some
apparent blunder, perhaps some real blunder, catches the public eye. At
once the antagonist Parliamentary sections, which want to act on the
department, seize the opportunity. They make speeches, they move for
documents, they amass statistics. They declare "that in no other
country is such a policy possible as that which the department is
pursuing; that it is mediaeval; that it costs money; that it wastes
life; that America does the contrary; that Prussia does the contrary".
The newspapers follow according to their nature. These bits of
administrative scandal amuse the public. Articles on them are very easy
to write, easy to read, easy to talk about. They please the vanity of
mankind. We think as we read, "Thank God, _I_ am not as that man; _I_
did not send green coffee to the Crimea; _I_ did not send patent
cartridge to the common guns, and common cartridge to the breech
loaders. _I_ make money; that miserable public functionary only wastes
money". As for the defence of the department, no one cares for it or
reads it. Naturally at first hearing it does not sound true. The
Opposition have the unrestricted selection of the point of attack, and
they seldom choose a case in which the department, upon the surface of
the matter, seems to be right. The case of first impression will always
be that something shameful has happened; that such and such men did
die; that this and that gun would not go off; that this or that ship
will not sail. All the pretty reading is unfavourable, and all the
praise is very dull.

Nothing is more helpless than such a department in Parliament if it has
no authorised official defender. The wasps of the House fasten on it;
here they perceive is something easy to sting, and safe, for it cannot
sting in return. The small grain of foundation for complaint
germinates, till it becomes a whole crop. At once the Minister of the
day is appealed to; he is at the head of the administration, and he
must put the errors right, if such they are. The Opposition leader
says: "I put it to the right honourable gentleman, the First Lord of
the Treasury. He is a man of business. I do not agree with him in his
choice of ends, but he is an almost perfect master of methods and
means. What he wishes to do he does do. Now I appeal to him whether
such gratuitous errors, such fatuous incapacity, are to be permitted in
the public service. Perhaps the right honourable gentleman will grant
me his attention while I show from the very documents of the
departments," etc., etc. What is the Minister to do? He never heard of
this matter; he does not care about the matter. Several of the
supporters of the Government are interested in the opposition to the
department; a grave man, supposed to be wise, mutters, "This is TOO
bad". The Secretary of the Treasury tells him, "The House is uneasy. A
good many men are shaky. A. B. said yesterday he had been dragged
through the dirt four nights following. Indeed I am disposed to think
myself that the department has been somewhat lax. Perhaps an inquiry,"
etc., etc. And upon that the Prime Minister rises and says: "That Her
Majesty's Government having given very serious and grave consideration
to this most important subject, are not prepared to say that in so
complicated a matter the department has been perfectly exempt from
error. He does not indeed concur in all the statements which have been
made; it is obvious that several of the charges advanced are
inconsistent with one another. If A. had really died from eating green
coffee on the Tuesday, it is plain he could not have suffered from
insufficient medical attendance on the following Thursday. However, on
so complex a subject, and one so foreign to common experience, he will
not give a judgment. And if the honourable member would be satisfied
with having the matter inquired into by a committee of that House, he
will be prepared to accede to the suggestion."

Possibly the outlying department, distrusting the Ministry, crams a
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.

The immense importance of such a fresh mind is greatest in a country
where business changes most. A dead, inactive, agricultural country may
be governed by an unalterable bureau for years and years, and no harm
come of it. If a wise man arranged the bureau rightly in the beginning,
it may run rightly a long time. But if the country be a progressive,
eager, changing one, soon the bureau will either cramp improvement, or
be destroyed itself.

This conception of the use of a Parliamentary head shows how wrong is
the obvious notion which regards him as the principal administrator of
his office. The late Sir George Lewis used to be fond of explaining
this subject. He had every means of knowing. He was bred in the
permanent civil service. He was a very successful Chancellor of the
Exchequer, a very successful Home Secretary, and he died Minister for
War. He used to say, "It is not the business of a Cabinet Minister to
work his department. His business is to see that it is properly worked.
If he does much, he is probably doing harm. The permanent staff of the
office can do what he chooses to do much better, or if they cannot,
they ought to be removed. He is only a bird of passage, and cannot
compete with those who are in the office all their lives round." Sir
George Lewis was a perfect Parliamentary head of an office, so far as
that head is to be a keen critic and rational corrector of it.

But Sir George Lewis was not perfect; he was not even an average good
head in another respect. The use of a fresh mind applied to the
official mind is not only a corrective use, it is also an animating
use. A public department is very apt to be dead to what is wanting for
a great occasion till the occasion is past. The vague public mind will
appreciate some signal duty before the precise, occupied administration
perceives it The Duke of Newcastle was of this use at least in the
Crimean War. He roused up his department, though when roused it could
not act. A perfect Parliamentary Minister would be one who should add
the animating capacity of the Duke of Newcastle to the accumulated
sense, the detective instinct, and the laissez faire habit of Sir George Lewis.

댓글 없음: