OFFICIALISM.
THOSE who assail the officials qua officials—an assault which recurs periodically whenever things go wrong— seem to us usually to miss in their vehemence the true point of attack. They either condemn the officials as noodles, as Charles Dickens used invariably to do, or they accuse them of a perverse wish to prevent the success of their own depart- ments. Both accusations are a little absurd. The civilians —it is a much better word than officials, though it used to have another meaning—desire the success of their offices as strongly as clerks desire the prosperity of their firms, and they are as a rule, with certain limitations, among the most efficient of mankind. They are at least as able as their brethren, the professionals; they are, when there is need, quite as industrious, and they are on the whole decidedly more disinterested. Their failures arise from their success, their weakness from their strength. Their experience for example, which is unrivalled, often becomes a snare. Every- thing has been before them a hundred times, till they come to believe that the thing which has not been before them, the absolutely new thing or set of conditions, cannot have any- thing in it worth considering. Tale the case of inventions. The inventor who finds his invention rejected or decried, or referred for experiment till he is heart-sick with delay and expense, looks upon "the clerks," as he calls them, with whom he is brought in contact, as enemies alike of himself and of the State. He has no idea, can have no idea, that the experienced man whom he condemns so utterly, and some- times hates so hard, has been wearied with inventions for half his life, has examined hundreds, and has learned by long and bitter experience to distrust both inventors and their inven- tions. But for that distrust the State would be plundered and befooled every day, and he therefore either rejects, perhaps too rapidly, or he protects himself and his unseen employer by elaborate and repeated experiments, which seem to the inventor who has made them all intended only to cause delay. Naturally he does not, and cannot, spring up to welcome the one invention in a thousand which is better than all that have gone before. In a similar way the official is aware from the plenitude of his experience that almost all public criticism is ill-informed and rash, that if he yielded to it the public service would go to pieces, and that his duty is to guard his less experienced chief from giving way to such ignorant pressure. He is therefore inclined, out of his wish to do his duty, to disregard, and even to treat with contumely, the criticism which happens to be accurate, and, therefore, in the end irresistible. He really knows all the old facts much better than his assailant., who usually does not know half of them, and he can hardly be expected to see all at once the new fact which really dominates the situation. Take for example the question of the propor- tion of artillery to other arms in an expedition. The War Office official really knows the proportion agreed upon by the
experts of many countries, he has a rule in his mind which seems to him as clear as a rule in arithmetic, and which no doubt was once equally accurate, and he cannot fling aside all that knowledge and neglect all that experience because some one tells him and the country that a new condition has arisen in South Africa which renders twice as much artillery indis- pensable. Where is the proof of that, where can be the proof of that, strong enough to outweigh the teaching of a hundred expeditions? To believe it he must be imaginative or viewy, and the viewy or imaginative man does not rise to the top in the permanent service, and ought not, in the regular course of things, to rise to the top. For ninety years in the century he would be a dangerous nuisance costing infinite money; and,w hat is worse, producing a sort of wobble in the ways of doing business which would speedily throw a department out of gear, and by compelling subordinates to think and experi- ment would produce delays ruinous to efficiency. Of course the habit of relying on experience produces experienced men, that is, men who know first of all that routine is invaluable, that every departure from it means mischief of one sort or another, and who consequently will not depart from it on the rare occasions when euch departure is expedient or, it may be, imperative. The better a gardener is and the more experienced, the less will he believe in a new method of grafting, or the adoption of a new mould for his favourite flowers. He may obey a direct order to try the new sugges- tion, not only because he fears for his place, but because he recognises obedience to be in the last resort his first duty, and he is always inclined when he can see a duty to do it, but nothing short of an order will move him out of his straight and perfectly correct path. He knows, perhaps, ten times as much as the man who gives the order, and, very rightly from his point of view, cannot conceive why his knowledge should be treated as unavailing. He is, in resisting innovations, only protecting his department against foolishness, such eta he has seen exposed a score of times before.
So far from officials desiring, as Dickens always supposed, to neglect duty, their greatest blunders often proceed from over-attention to it. They get absorbed by it till they lose any just sense of the proportion of things, and are ready to sacrifice anything to its performance. Discipline in soldiers is invaluable; discipline can only be ensured by an invariable enforcement of obedience in minute details, and therefore the War Office man, having to deal with Volunteers or Colonials, disgusts them by requirements which, as be knows by long experience, are required to make Rood Regulars. He does not do it out of any perversity, but because he would be a bad official if he were to think for himself, and, as it were, invent or sanction a new discipline of his own. His duty is to maintain the old one by which great regiments have been trained to victory. It is not for him, but for his superiors, to recognise the fact that given certain conditions, a soldier can be made by a discipline of which he has no experience. The effect of this feeling of duty is perhaps most apparent in national Treasuries. The experienced men in a great Treasury have been trained all their lives in the perfectly accurate belief that the strength of a nation depends on sound finance, that everybody employed by a State will waste if he can, if only to secure perfection, and that their duty is to prevent such waste. They accordingly do prevent it, to the infinite advantage of the State until, on some unlucky day, lavishness is indispensable, and, of course, is, to the extent of their power, arrested. That is their duty until they have special orders, and they do it. How hard it is for them to believe that such a duty can be intermittent is perhaps beet illustrated by the well-known example of Queen Elizabeth. The great Queen nearly wrecked England by her parsimony, and is therefore condemned by historian after historian for her "avarice." She probably had no avarice in her composition. She may have, probably had, inherited a trace of the rigid spirit of her grandfather, Henry VII., that able attorney on a throne, but she did not hoard money for herself, but for the State. The revenue in her time was small in proportion to the demands on it, she was convinced that it was her first duty to keep the Treasury solvent, and like any other sparing housewife, her notion of the method was to resist every demand, to cat down every supply, and to seek unpaid help from any individual whom she could suppose to be bound to render it. So she levied every penny to which she was entitled ; she cut down indents even for powder, as a housewife cuts down demands for gravy beef ; and she required of her nobles and her courtiers expenditure from their own purses, which it had previously been their duty to make, but which it was their duty no longer. She acted, in fact, as Treasury officials sometimes act now, from an inap- plicable sense of duty ; and not once or twice, but several times, she nearly paralysed her administration. Frederick the Great did precisely the same thing from the same motive, and both King and Queen in time of peace saved their people from great suffering and misfortunes. They were successful, and wel e therefore forgiven, as Treasury officials are now, and will be always, until the unlucky day when the Armada approaches, and there is not powder enough to supply the resisting fleet. It is vain to say the officials are perverse, or mean, or avaricious ; they are simply doing their proper work without the imagination to see that, new conditions having arisen, they should do it in a different way. Yet if they allowed imagination full play, and always accepted every beneficial suggestion from every department, the State would speedily be ruined. That is just what happened in France in 1872-1892, the twenty years during which every electoral district pleaded for every " civilising " improvement, and the Treasury yielded to every plea, till the Debt increased by 60 per cent., and taxation became almost i ns pportable.
We suspect that even the most perverse of all official peculiarities, the tendency of departments to quarrel with each other—silent quarrelling it is as far as the public is concerned, but occasionally most fierce—arises from an in- convenient sense of duty. Each department thinks inter- ference from the other, or aggression by the other, injurious to efficiency, and consequently resists it. The resistance constantly produces deadlocks, but it is probably right in principle. All servants in a house should pull together, no doubt, but the moment the gardener interferes with the stable, or the kitchen with the gardener, the master begins to be badly served. We are all inclined to suspect when such an event occurs that the servants are only " standing upon their dignity," but they are also acting upon an instinctive sense that a strong line of demarcation between different departments tends to perfect their efficiency by making responsibility almost self-evident. The " clerks " have just the same instinct, sharpened no doubt by that jealous amour propre which marks in all countries the servants of the State, and which, like pride in the uniform, enables the State to secure cheaply the most devoted service. The remedy for officialism, the only one that is effective, is a chief who knows at once when it is in the way, and has the nerve by a clear order to sweep it out of the path. English officials do not resist clear orders from recognised superiors, even when they think them unwise, any more than soldiers do, but hold, like the soldiers, " their's not to reason why, their's but to do," and be promoted if they can.
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