Bureaucracy
But the horde of officials and inspectors will change democracy into bureaucracy, and the discovery is sometimes made too late that a land is ruled by permanent officials, and not by elected representatives. The elected representatives may sit and pass laws, but the bureaucracy which administers them will be the real authority.
It may be an entirely honest and efficient bureaucracy, as free from political partisanship as our British Civil Service and police-court magistracy are, but if it is admitted to be outside the jurisdiction of the House of Commons, and to be under no obedience to local councils, and if its powers involve a close inquisition into the lives of the people, and include the right to interfere daily with these lives, then bureaucracy and not democracy is the actual government.
A host of salaried political workers—agents, organisers, secretaries, etc.—will make popular representative government a mere matter of political rivalry, an affair of “ins and outs,” and by this development of the party system will exclude from active politics all who are not loyal to the “machine,” and are not strong enough to break it. But a host of public officers—inspectors, clerks, etc.—paid out of the public funds will do more than pervert representative government: they will make it subordinate to the permanent official class; and bureaucracy, once firmly in the saddle, is harder to get rid of than the absolutism of kings, or the rule of an aristocracy.
Yet a permanent Civil Service is better in every way in a democracy than a Civil Service which lives and dies with a political party, and is changed with the Cabinet.
On the whole, the best thing for democracy is that the paid workers in politics should be as few as possible, and the number of salaried state officials strictly limited. The fewer the paid political workers, the fewer people will be concerned to maintain the efficiency of the political machine, and the more freely will the electorate act in the choice of its representatives. The fewer the salaried officials of State, the less inspection and restriction, and the less encouragement to habits of submission in the people. Democracy must depend on a healthy, robust sense of personal responsibility in its citizens, and every increase in the inspectorate tends to diminish this personal responsibility, and to breed a “servile state” that will fall a willing prey to tyranny and bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, whilst in self-defence democracy will avoid increasing its officials, it will distinguish between officials and employees. It is bound to add to the number of its employees every year, as its municipal and imperial responsibilities grow steadily larger, and these employees, rightly regarded as public servants, cannot threaten to become our masters.