bodies. One would not have been surprised if this argument had been
used by the friends of the proposition, as an answer to its
principal difficulty. Coming from the opponents it is strange
enough. What is urged as an objection is the safety-valve of the
proposed system. If indeed all the high talent of the country could be
drawn into the service of the government, a proposal tending to
bring about that result might well inspire uneasiness. If every part
of the business of society which required organised concert, or
large and comprehensive views, were in the hands of the government,
and if government offices were universally filled by the ablest men,
all the enlarged culture and practised intelligence in the country,
except the purely speculative, would be concentrated in a numerous
bureaucracy, to whom alone the rest of the community would look for
all things: the multitude for direction and dictation in all they
had to do; the able and aspiring for personal advancement. To be
admitted into the ranks of this bureaucracy, and when admitted, to
rise therein, would be the sole objects of ambition. Under this
regime, not only is the outside public ill-qualified, for want of
practical experience, to criticise or check the mode of operation of
the bureaucracy, but even if the accidents of despotic or the
natural working of popular institutions occasionally raise to the
summit a ruler or rulers of reforming inclinations, no reform can be
effected which is contrary to the interest of the bureaucracy.

  Such is the melancholy condition of the Russian empire, as shown
in the accounts of those who have had sufficient opportunity of
observation. The Czar himself is powerless against the bureaucratic
body; he can send any one of them to Siberia, but he cannot govern
without them, or against their will. On every decree of his they
have a tacit veto, by merely refraining from carrying it into
effect. In countries of more advanced civilisation and of a more
insurrectionary spirit, the public, accustomed to expect everything to
be done for them by the State, or at least to do nothing for
themselves without asking from the State not only leave to do it,
but even how it is to be done, naturally hold the State responsible
for all evil which befalls them, and when the evil exceeds their
amount of patience, they rise against the government, and make what is
called a revolution; whereupon somebody else, with or without
legitimate authority from the nation, vaults into the seat, issues his
orders to the bureaucracy, and everything goes on much as it did
before; the bureaucracy being unchanged, and nobody else being capable
of taking their place.

  A very different spectacle is exhibited among a people accustomed to
transact their own business. In France, a large part of the people,
having been engaged in military service, many of whom have held at
least the rank of non commissioned officers, there are in every
popular insurrection several persons competent to take the lead, and
improvise some tolerable plan of action. What the French are in
military affairs, the Americans are in every kind of civil business;
let them be left without a government, every body of Americans is able
to improvise one, and to carry on that or any other public business
with a sufficient amount of intelligence, order, and decision. This is
what every free people ought to be: and a people capable of this is
certain to be free; it will never let itself be enslaved by any man or
body of men because these are able to seize and pull the reins of
the central administration. No bureaucracy can hope to make such a
people as this do or undergo anything that they do not like. But where
everything is done through the bureaucracy, nothing to which the
bureaucracy is really adverse can be done at all. The constitution
of such countries is an organisation of the experience and practical
ability of the nation into a disciplined body for the purpose of
governing the rest; and the more perfect that organisation is in
itself, the more successful in drawing to itself and educating for
itself the persons of greatest capacity from all ranks of the
community, the more complete is the bondage of all, the members of the
bureaucracy included. For the governors are as much the slaves of
their organisation and discipline as the governed are of the
governors. A Chinese mandarin is as much the tool and creature of a
despotism as the humblest cultivator. An individual Jesuit is to the
utmost degree of abasement the slave of his order, though the order
itself exists for the collective power and importance of its members.

  It is not, also, to be forgotten, that the absorption of all the
principal ability of the country into the governing body is fatal,
sooner or later, to the mental activity and progressiveness of the
body itself. Banded together as they are- working a system which,
like all systems, necessarily proceeds in a great measure by fixed
rules- the official body are under the constant temptation of sinking
into indolent routine, or, if they now and then desert that mill-horse
round, of rushing into some half-examined crudity which has struck the
fancy of some leading member of the corps; and the sole check to these
closely allied, though seemingly opposite, tendencies, the only
stimulus which can keep the ability of the body itself up to a high
standard, is liability to the watchful criticism of equal ability
outside the body. It is indispensable, therefore, that the means
should exist, independently of the government, of forming such
ability, and furnishing it with the opportunities and experience
necessary for a correct judgment of great practical affairs. If we
would possess permanently a skilful and efficient body of
functionaries- above all, a body able to originate and willing to
adopt improvements; if we would not have our bureaucracy degenerate
into a pedantocracy, this body must not engross all the occupations
which form and cultivate the faculties required for the government
of mankind.

  To determine the point at which evils, so formidable to human
freedom and advancement, begin, or rather at which they begin to
predominate over the benefits attending the collective application
of the force of society, under its recognised chiefs, for the